Upgraded an old ECS K7S5A (on my way to a barton).

Overall linux compatibility was good. I had difficulty with the onboard Broadcom 4401 Lan port, but there seem to be others on here who have a fix. I have yet to try it as i have a trusty linksys nic from previous build.

C-Media 9739A audio seems to be poorly supported by ALSA, i'll be trying an oss solution soon enough. I suppose i'll have to be patient! quality is good enough, but the problem is the lack of volume control.

I will update this as i have opportunity to ...

Just wondering what kernel to use with this chipset, as I cannot find one

Everything should work on this board. I think that there is early SATA support as well. I suggest disabling the C-Media audio chip in the BIOS, as it does not support hardware mixing. In my case, I've disabled it in favor of Aureal Vortex cards and a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, both of which support hardware mixing and EQ. The LAN works great, by means of the b44.o module. To think, I used a 3COM Ethernet card for two months before I even decided to test the Broadcom chip. In general, 2.4.22 kernel should be satisfactory for most things.

There is one problem with kernel 2.4.22 and this KT600 chipset. The GART is hardlocked in AGP 3 mode, and 2.4.22 doesn't have support for AGP 3.0. The choices are to use kernel 2.6, or do what I did... I use an ATI Radeon 9500 PRO, with ATI's binary fglrx drivers. It has an internal GART driver that works great with this board. It takes a minor one-line hack to get fglrx to work with this board. Linuxquestions.org has a thread with this info.

nVidia cards also have an external GART driver as well, which should work, but I've heard that they don't work as well on this board with kernel 2.4.xx.

In the last two months, I've not had a single lockup with this setup, on my Slackware 9.1 machine. It's a great board. I'd suggest this over the nForce 2 options right now. Again, my only complaint is the C-Media chip and its lack of hardware mixing support.

Pros: Stable, reliable, fast, most parts work well.

Cons: Poor audio chipset, not entirely ALSA's fault but rather a stupid hardware design. Bug that locks AGP in 3.0 mode, which older kernels do not support.