I'm thinking about getting this mobo and I'm wondering if anyone here has had any problems running Linux on a machine based on this mobo. I looked in the HCL here and I searched on "K7VMP2" and didn't get any hits.

I'm pondering this mobo with an AMD XP 3000+ CPU instead of the 2800+ and going with 1GB of RAM.

Thanks in advance!

Peace...

i am a newbie, so I probably won't be much help, but I am just setting up this MOBO as a dual boot system. My first attempt at installing RH9 seemed to go ok, but it does not respond to my mouse - though it recongnized it during load, it never actually responded to mouse movement. I am using a GE usb optical scroll mouse and a 2.4 processor with 512 megs. Tomorrow I will stick a serial mouse on just to try it and do a re install.

Cool! Be sure to let me know how it goes! I haven't purchased this MOBO yet so I'm curious to hear what your experience with it is.

Peace...

I'm running this mobo with an AMD XP 2400+ and 256M ram. The only problem I've had is finding a distro with a driver for the onboard video. After trying Fedora 1 and Suse 9, I ended up going back to RH9 and using a driver from www.viaarena.com which required a rather ugly hack. Now I'm at least off of VGA mode, but 3d acceleration is disabled and none of the games will run. The only other solution I've found requires recompiling the kernel, which I'd rather not do since everything else works perfectly. Has anyone else solved this?

wondering what mouse you are using, or where you plugged it in. my usb mouse is still fritzing. Haven't moved on to video issues yet..

My mouse is a plain logitech optical, but I'm using the "logitech wireless mouse" driver with default settings.

It looks like the "easy" fix for this is to use a distro with kernel 2.6 and XFree86 4.4 to get built-in support for the VIA onboard video. Since I don't want to be on the bleeding edge right now, I just bought an nvidia agp card and installed FC1. My kid's games never ran so fast!

Excellent! I'm already running the 2.6.5 kernel on my Slackware 8-base system and I upgraded to XFree86 4.4.0 when it was released so I guess I'm already set! I've got a PS/2 keyboard and mouse and the only other question would be support for any onboard NICs, if there are any.

Thanks for the info guys!

Peace...

The onboard NIC in this case is a VIA Rhine II which Fedora detected and setup with no intervention on my part. I don't know about Slackware but I'm guessing it'll be the same.

What kernel are you running? I would imagine if the 2.4 or 2.6 kernel supported this NIC I should be in good shape.

Thanks!

Peace...

Kernel 2.4.22

Sweet! I should be in great shape then!

Peace...

I am running this motherboard with 2800 chip. I installed Suse 9.1 on it and it seemed to function ok. I had to uninstall it though as I could not configure my system to the ability of running a dual OS windows XP and Linux. I tried partioning the hard drive and running two different hard drives with two different OS's. Maybe it could be done but it was beyond my attempts.

My next step is to set up two seperate mid-towers with motherboards,floppys, harddrives etc. and then use a KVM to hook up the two separte systems to the same keyboard , mouse, and monitor. I think this can be done easily enough with windows OS but I don't know what to expect with one system being XP and the other SUSE 9.1. It should go ok but you never know.

In all I think the Soyo MB is good and I ahve been pleased with it but the CPU fan is quite a bit louder than the one cooling my old socket 7. But its also 2800 vs old 300 mhz so I suppose it needs to move more air.