Someone told me the motherboard Asus A7v8x is hard to setup on linux or unix is that true? Has anyone hear any good things about the AMD XP 2200+ or should i be looking at the Penitum 4?

The motherboard itself can't be hard to set up as long as it isn't a special board like a multi-processor board. I haven't had any problems with up-to-date boards and linux ... although there is no official way to check for supported hardware yet you could for instance check the RedHat Hardware Compability List and the SuSE Hardware Database

They are updated frequently and should help you, the ideal way would be of course checking the linux kernel itself!

But what happon if you can download the new kernel on the net if you can't get online with your new unix or linux box?

Its not really that simple...

I haven't heard any grounches with the current issue distros that are based around either 2.4.18 and 2.4.19 and either the KT333 or KT400 chipsets that are the most popular ones that XP motherboards run on. The straight AMD chipsets also seem to be fully supported. Pentium boards, same deal, they just cost 2x as much

Not being able to get online is a matter of how you get online. Winmodem? Good luck... too many chipsets and too much unsupported goo, manufacturers not releasing specs: www.linmodems.org has a decent HCL for that.

Cable modem or DSL over a network card? Nearly every NIC seems supported these days, although I have run a accross a few disapointments, anything based on the tulip or realtek 8139 chipsets are uber-supported, and above all, easy to find: like the Linksys LNE100-TX.

Cheers,

Finegan

On-board sound on one of my MB's didn't work (early kernel 2.4), so I disabled it in the BIOS and fitted a PCI sound card. Otherwise most things seem to be supported, even laptop on-board tulip ethernet has worked fine for a number of years.
Regards
Sid.