OK. I got burned. I bought an Asus A7N266-VM.

Great board, great specs, too many problems getting Linux up and running. So I am going to demote the board to a Windows box as punishment and I am looking for a good, cheap Athlon board to replace it. Actually, I will be config'ing two Linux boxes...

My preferences

I prefer to have an "all in one board" simply for cost savings, but I have NICs and sound cards aplenty, so if it is a bare-bones board that I have to add a video card too, that's not too bad.

I want to Run RHL 8.0. I have been using RHL for a while and I like it, it suits me fine.

I don't want to have to hassle with non-standard driver--it gets to be a hassle to keep that stuff up-to-date.

PLEASE only reccommend boards if you have experience installing RHL 8 on them personally! The A7N266-VM was recommended to me as a good Linux board and see what happned to me!

Bump

I'm using a ecs k7s5a rev 1.x. There is even a howto about this board. The only problems I've had are you have to load the enlighten sound daemon to run real audio in KDE, I can only get sound recorder to work in Gnome. The Logitech usb mouse works well. ps2 mice don't scroll. I haven't been able to get the pctel amr to work--yet. I did get a pctel pci winmodem to work with RH 7.1 on this board and a ess solo1 soundcard . Now I'm usign onboard sound. Currently I'm using a usb actiontech modem. I haven't tried a serial modem. The onboard network connection works. I'm pretty satisfied with this board. I'm dual booting with win98 being used for gaming. One quirk I found is that in win98 my system hangs with the modem using the internet and sound at the same time, however there is no problem with internet and audio in linux.

I second that. I use the K7S5A from ECS in four of my five Linux boxes. It's a good all around board.