I am building a new machine over december/january and I am wanting to go with a motherboard with PCI Express and socket 939 and SATA with a base price of $150 or less. (Less is better )

Anyways, I was wondering which you guys have read (or possibly found) to be the most Linux compatible right of the box. I don't want to have reconfigure it everytime I try a new flavor of Linux.

I have read great things about the Nforce 4s and the via K8T890 (notably the nforce 4, and i'd prefer it just because i really believe in nvidia's support for the linux community) but I want to make sure they are linux compatable. So if you guys could, maybe list some motherboards that feature what I need that you know are good for linux. Thanks!!!

As far as PCI-Express goes... from a software standpoint it is no different then any other PCI bus so linux will support that without any changes. The only issues I could see you having is with special features of the nForce chipset like the Ethernet interface, any special hard disk controllers, and the sound hardware. I'm sure there will be a drive released from nvidia for that stuff (if it doesn't already exist), but everything else should pretty much work.

yeah, i hoped nvidia would do that, my only worry is a friend who has an nforce 3 with a SIL SATA controller that doesn't work without a lot of workarounds...

but thanks for the advice, any other thoughts?

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