I'm new to this forum, new to linux, and pretty much new to everything. C'est la Vie.
Anyway I built a new PC recently, and while running Win2k and WinXP..
i reformatted dozens of times and had everything go wrong you could think of,
short of the PC exploding in my face. I swear if the thing had a leg it would
kick me in the nuts.
I decided to try to go the route of the mighty, and do that linux boogey.
Simple question: I read on a past posting that my Abit AW8D motherboard has support
for linux, yet all my scouring the net like a teenager looking for porn has turned up zilch.
Am I stupid? wait, don't answer that. Can somebody share their wisdom here, I wanna get off
the windows incubator and become a new man.

The tried and true approach to sorting out the linux compatibility of anything is to boot the machine in question with a live distro. Should everything work, then you are home and hosed ... nothing left to do.

Some things don't work, then you can use the live distro to interrogate your hardware to find out what it thinks it is. The "lspci" command is good for this, as it will report what the hardware is instead of whatever misleading trade-name the vendor uses.

There is a sticky in this very forum which explains the sort of information that is useful and how to get it out of linux. It is called something like "how to post to this forum" or something of that nature.

Enough of the general: your mobo will be something like the following...
http://www.cpu3d.com/index.php?optio...id=418&limit=1

If so then congratulations on an excellent choice.

This uses an intel chipset base - so should be well supported out of the box - you probably won't need any additional drivers. Install and away you go.

It is an enthusiasts board - if you are using the dual ATI cards, you will be looking at the proprietary driver... this is well documented.

It uses SATA - you may need to set sata to legacy ide for the installation for some distributions.

Intel HD Audio - some people have been having trouble with this. There is a driver but it works best in very recent kernels. Be prepared to upgrade the kernel after installation. (You should do a general upgrade anyway.)

May I suggest: Ubuntu Feisty-Fawn for this board.
Basically, you want a very recent release (Fedora Core 7 should be good too) and you don't want to be messing about with custom settings and installing drivers while you are getting used to the way linux does things.

Once you feel comfy though, I would suggest you consider a more customizable distro like slackware or gentoo.

You do not need to upgrade the kernel to support the latest sound card or sound device. Just need to download the next stable or development version of ALSA. Though the kernel version should be at least 2.6.19 or the latest kernel. The module snd-hda which will be used for your motherboard is very buggy. Hopefully, it works with minimal problems. I suggest using a PCI sound card.

On-board NIC should work. You do not need to go to Realtek and try compile because the kernel supports it, but only if the desire distribution uses 2.6.19 or latest. I do not know if the module is r1000 or r8169.

The Intel SATA controller should work, but you may need to try different BIOS settings in order to get the drive working. The Silicon Image SATA controller may work or may not work. You can try sata_sil24 or ahci as the module.

I do not think ATI supports Crossfire in Linux, but I think you can use two different video cards in those 16X PCIe slots. When your skills improve, you can try to use Xinerama to increase work space or have multi-user access at the same time.

Use IDE hard drives and optical drives until you can get the SATA controllers working.

IMHO, I think Abit motherboards work better in Linux than they do in Windows. I have two Abit motherboards. They are TH7II-RAID and KA7-100.

Go to http://rute.2038bug.com/]LINUX: Rute...and Exposition.

Go to http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=546323 for my pre-installation Linux guide. It does not include a kernel parameter that can help booting up some Core 2 Duo systems.

I recommend stay away from ReiserFS for the filesystem. It is unreliable and can make your switch to Linux be like hell. I recommend using EXT3. If you want near desktop performance use either XFS or JFS. I use a combination of EXT3 and XFS.