Mandrake 9.2 didn't pick up the correct driver, neither did mandrake 10.0. I've noticed some distros do now though (Knoppix 3.3 for example, although I don't think 3.2 did).

To get this sound chip to work you have to change the driver to via82cxxx_audio which it took me about 3 months to find out.

The sound quality is poor because there's a lot of background 'computer thinking' noise.

Doesn't work consistently, and doesn't work with all users (this may be me not being very good rather than the support, though)

Picked up fine by the installer, but couldn't get it to work consistently with MDK 10. Sometimes it would work, sometimes not, with no apparent reason.

(worked fine with Fedora Core 2, however)

Fedora Core 1 (Kernel 2.4) did not recognize and configure sound.

Attempted download and install of ALSA driver, but the two disk Fedora Core distro I was using did not include kernel source. So that did not work. Upgraded to Fedora Core 2 which included ALSA driver as a new package in the distro.

Fedora Core 2 installer fecognized and correctly configured the ALSA sound driver.

XMMS must be used to play music CDs. Not a VIA issue. Its an HP issue. No analog cable from CD to sound and no way to plug one into the sound.

XMMS does digital sound from the CD, works fine.

It works and all that, but its as quiet as a mouse! i have to turn my huge sound system to max to hear it at all!

It works good, but I've had some issues with it before (using lastest relased alsa-libs -1.0.11- crashes artsd if the card hasn't been configured to use dxs_support=5 -this has been fixed in the repos, tho'-, I can't turn the volume at the maximum because the sound disorts) and the volume is indideed too low (that's not alsa's fault, the same happens under Windows).

I'd say is a not-so-well supported card for Linux, but which gets its job done.