I wanted to share my recent experience with this motherboard:
Chaintech S1689 ULi Socket 939 ATX Motherboard / Audio / AGP 8x/4x / 10/100 Ethernet LAN / USB2.0 / Serial ATA / RAID
This motherboard, while dirt cheap ($70), uses the ULi chipset rather than the popular nVidia or VIA BIOS. This turned out to be a major problem.
I tried installing the following linux distros: Gentoo 2004-3 r1, Mandrake 10.1 and Fedora 3. Mandrake and Fedora simply hung. In four days I couldn't get Gentoo to recognize my SATA HD and booting with gentoo doscsi or doataraid noapic caused the system to hang. I also tried FreeBSD, and while it installed and recognized the HD, I could not get it to recognize my Ethernet device. I may have eventually got it to work but it also crashed while installing KDE from the CD so I took that as an omen and gave up.
While I'm not a linux guru by any stretch of the imagination, I have RedHat linux on my other machine and have been using Unix-like systems at work for years.
One of the helpful fellas on the Gentoo.org forum was convinced the BIOS was the problem.
In contrast, Windows XP installed without any problems. But for Linux I would recommend that you avoid this motherboard.
I returned the motherboard and ordered a Gigabyte MB with nVidia BIOS instead.
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