I'm giving up on Fedora FC-4. Too many bug patches and problems during install. Looking for a nice stable distro for my new Intel 915 motherboard. Is anyone out there using a distro with this board & SATA drives. Any information much appreciated.

if you want stability, once you have a linux distro updated and correctly configured, an analogy to a rock one thousand miles from a fault line isn't to far off the truth. Some good distro's that are a bit less coddling and thus make you get off your butt and get things fixed up at install are archlinux, gentoo, and slackware. All 3 are wonderful once configured and have rather easy package management (with arch the easiest I'd say). All 3 should also support what you want.

Moved: This thread is more suitable in Distributions and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

Have you tried PCLinuxOS? It has a fair record at finding SATA drives, and as it installs from a Live CD, you can check whether it will detect your hardware before installation.

It has its own repositories which are up to date. MPlayer and RealPlayer come integrated into Firefox "out of the box". It uses Synaptic for RPM to update software, and you need only add "libdvdcss2" for a full multimedia experience. For things that need intervention (firewire for one) there is plenty of help on the site and on its wiki, for which links are provided on the default desktop.

Despite its "beta" numbering, it is as stable as anything else out there, its main man, Texstar, is just a bit of a perfectionist, that's all.