Spiney

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Problems encountered with the MKII-10000:
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DMA issue can cause total lockup when too much traffic on the PCI bus. This caused a total lockup for me whenever transferring files over the LAN. Internet was fine, but high-speed local transfer caused system lockup.

The PCMCIA slot has some issues. I could not get it to power a PCMCIA 802.11g card using the native drivers. However, by switching to the linuxant drivers, I was able to get things working.

VIA's support for the CLE266 graphics is far, far behind the current state of Linux. They finally released the source for their drivers, but the current way to go is to use the open-source unichrome drivers from sourceforge.


Conclusion:
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I used the Epia for a MythTV frontend/backend. I was frustrated enough to finally give up and switch to an AMD system. I just don't think VIA understands the importance of Linux support.

maroonbaboon

This board gives you a unique combination of low noise/power, small size and multiple i/o options, but as the previous review suggests it is not so easy to get everything to work with linux.

I haven't seen the lock-ups mentioned above, and problems with the wireless may be due to lack of support by the card manufacturer rather than VIA. There is plenty of information around (e.g. www.epiawiki.org) about drivers and so on.

There are now a couple of distro's targetted specifically at this board (www.epios.net and www.freepia.org) which are probably worth a look. I got them to boot OK, but didn't explore all features.

I also had some success with the ultracompact sbplinux distro (http://spblinux.sourceforge.net), booting from compact flash. It could manage full-screen MPEG4 with mplayer.

Network boot using LTSP (http://www.ltsp.org) also worked.

For multimedia applications this board is probably still for the dedicated hobbyist rather than the typical RH or SuSE (or even Debian) customer. More like the old days of linux c.1995. Although it has a 1GHz processor it seems slower, maybe due to small caches.

But if you just want a small quiet, maybe diskless, system, don't need the advanced multimedia features and have a bit of knowledge about setting things up (and some time and patience) it seems a pretty good deal.