Overall a pretty good board but the main problem the Linux community will face with this kit is the limited support of the onboard Castlerock graphics. Via has chosen to support Linux with binary-only drivers built against older mainstream distributions (Red Hat 9.0, Suse 8.2, Mandrake 9) so your kernel choice is limited to the distro's default.

While it still functions in X with a VESA driver, it's nowhere near as nice as the available 3d hardware acceleration, simultaneos TV-out and VGA, and of course MPEG2 decoding.

Another word of caution - if you are looking to use the on-board hardware Random Number Generator you'll want to ensure you have the most recent version of motherboard. It sounds like the first production release failed to include the advertised item.

As mentioned above, the CLE266 CastleRock chip is not supported in SuSE 9.0. I get some random tearing using the VESA driver but it's not too bad.

As for outside distro driver support, XFree86 4.4.0 comes with a compatible driver although I have not tried this as of yet.

Otherwise, the distro detected everything else fine.

VIA EPIA MS10000E

I've had no problems so far at all. XWindows driver was easy (via driver works fine). I can use a 686 instruction set kernel (older chipsets didn't support all of the optional extras). I've not had any problems at all. The only thing I have left to configure is the onboard sound and USB. If I don't post again it's because I've had no problems.