ATI(amd) and openSUSE(Novell)?
 

I've tried more than a dozen distros on my backup box(8 year old mobo,Athlon xp 2200+,1GB ram,2X40GB h/d,and the only one that worked very well was openSUSE(particularly KDE).This was the case with several different old ATI vid cards(all of them 64MB).I'm wondering if this is normal,and if so why?

This box is Athlon XP, 1GB ram, abhout 160G hd, SiS chipset, and I find any distro works, but not all work straight out of the box. Most land 'jammy side down' and I lose 2 or 3 sessions configuring everything exactly the way I want it. Old ATI cards may be a problem - I have a nvidia mx-440, old enough to be given away in breakfast cereal boxes. I have not updated from slackware-12.0, largely because the libGL.so nvidia provide is from the last millenium, and I don't want to find out the hard way that it is incompatible with the latest mesa. If you are running a via chipset, post the exact one and I'll give you the gotchas.

I can see you having video issues, and with some chipsets, other issues as well, but you should be fine. I avoid kde like the plague. It seems to be gigabytes of sloth scripts.

VIA KM266.I agree about KDE.Strange, but ubuntu,vector linux,linux mint,mandriva,PClos,debian,etc...just don't work..I pop in openSUSE 11.2 KDE and runs like a charm(in comparision).

Oh dear. Some of the issues I ran across with VIA chipsets were
1. The usb (if you have 3 hubs, 6 ports) generates log spam (overcurrent change errors). Solution stuff the complaining ports with devices, or insert the module option
option ehci_hdc ignore_oc=1

2. APIC trouble. The VIA APIC (Interrupt controller) was broken, giving the same few hal;fassed irqs to everything. You would get this sort of thing in 'cat /proc/interrupts'
irq10 sound synth nic usb1
irq22 ide0 ide1 usb2 opl3
without any attention to what the devices wanted (stored on the pci card) or what they normally have (stored in ESCD or something) or what they would work on(hard coded into the kernel). This manifested itself for me, for example, in no network. Much investigation, pain & suffering revealed the card worked in the same slot on irq 11 in windows, but was being given irq 18 or 12 in linux. Boot with noapic, you go back to 16 interrupts, drop irq sharing for the most part, and all is better (not well, just better)
3. Your ide is still probably on 33 Mhz because the chipset was congenitally incapable of being set to 66 Mhz, or even 33.1 Mhz.

The last Via motherboard died here (Via KT333 chipset) and I went to some lengths to get a non via chipset (SiS, in fact). Never looked back.