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it is a economic mATX mother board with everything onboard. Ethernet would work w/o problems. The onboard SI7012 sound chip is not working well in hoary. It may work well in other linux distros.

In JUN05, my Si7012:
- have sound in alsa output, although the sound is skipping sometimes
- have sound in oss output, no skipping but volume is at 0% or 100%

It come with a asrock mother board with intergrated 2D/3D video support. It work but it is buggy.
1) you may see the screen scroll off for awhile
2) in xv output, once in a while, a video frame may fry off to another location. you may also see strange color in that frame as well.
3) the default xv contrast is too high, you can reset it to 0 in xorg.conf
4) there are no hardware 3d accelation in linux yet. So it is extremely slow, let's say that my old AMD850+TNT2 would outperform this new machine at least 5 times in video performance.

In xorg.conf, it is recommended to use these options in the section of display card:
Section "Device"
Identifier "bla bla bla"
Driver "sis"
Option "UseSSE" "yes"
Option "XvDefaultContrast" "0"
Option "XvDefaultBrightness" "0"
Option "XvDefaultHue" "0"
Option "XvDefaultSaturation" "0"
EndSection

Conclusion: the sound problem may only present in hoary release, although the video is buggy, it doesn't halt your sistem like ATi do. If you need a viedo card for gaming you may want to plug a nVidia video card.

sebmkd

I'm new to Linux and I've only tried Ubuntu 6.06 and Mandriva 2006 (10.1). After attempting to save my windows partition and having tones of difficulties -- any veteran would found futile -- I decided I'd convert my K7S41 based PC to linux entirely.

Mounting Ubuntu 6.06 went smoothly. All the hardware has been detected without a hitch! (onboard LAN, onboard graphics, USB2, DVD player ... even my KVM switch worked flawlessly).

The only issue that I've faced was regarding the video resolution: I couldn't change it without crashing the system. It didn't bother me initially, but after some time I wanted it fixed. I've followed this How To for that:https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Fi...esolutionHowto
and fixed my /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Don't ask my exactly what I did. I only knew I had to add Horizontal and Vertical sync to the config file and I did.

Rig is now working flawlessly (I'm still struggling with playing DVDs and MP3s -- I'm learning slowly)! But overwhole it's a very good motherboard. Adequate for everything but Doom 3 and video editing though! I also think that now it's outdated, and finding a good Socket A processor is hard. For this reason only I won't give it the top rating; but still highly recommend it.