Re: motherboard decision help

fred smith wrote:

One MB that has caught my eye is the Gigabyte GA-7VT600-L, a Via KT600
chipset board. It also has integrated audio and LAN, using Realtec ALC-655
audio chipset and Realtec 8101L 10/100 LAN chipset. I'd appreciate it if
any of you know of how well this board and these chipsets are supported
in a modern Linux if you'd let me know. This Gigabyte board can be
purchased today for US$63 from newegg (not a plug, just a fact).

This MB will work fine as long as you don't need accelerated 3D graphics. The AGP 8X port is not supported well with the 2.4 kernel, but does have support in the 2.6 kernels. I could not get direct rendering to work with a 2.4 kernel, but had success with the 2.6 kernel. So, if you want accelerated 3D, go with the 2.6 kernel.

Alternatively, I'd also appreciate suggestions for similarly priced boards
that are known to work well (I'd like to not go much over about $80). (I'm
leaning away from an Nvidia chipset board merely because I don't want to
depend on nvidia for closed-source drivers for the board, though I could
perhaps be convinced otherwise!) One small caveat is I need two serial
ports, and some new boards come with only one (I'm using both a serial modem
and serial UPS).

I am using the GigaByte GA-7N400 Pro2 MB, which uses the Nvidia nforce2 chipset. I'm not using any of the Nvidia drivers. This mobo uses the RealTek 8169 onboard gigabit lan, and not the nforce2 lan. I tried using the Nvidia drivers for the onboard sound, and they had problems. Anaconda selected the intel8x0 driver for the onboard video, and that works much better than the Nvidia driver. This mobo has worked well with RH9 (but needed a later kernel), and has worked well with FC1 right out of the box. It's almost twice the price of the GA-7VT600-L, but it has SATA, RAID, and Dual Channel memory. I'm not using the RAID, but SATA works (though not at full speed yet), and dual channel memory is about 50% faster than single channel mode. There is also a cheaper model that does not have the RAID and SATA, and has a 100base T NIC.