Well its official, the beautiful new mainboard I bought from VIA for my new box sucks my @$$. I should have known that a motherboard that new would have problems with support. And of course VIA is no help. Despite best efforts, four kernel recompiles of three different kernel versions, and two patches later the agpgart kernel module simply will cannot read the aperture size of the AGP. It identifies the chipset after a patch but still can't get the aperture. As a result, it quickly reduces the Radeon 9700 Pro I spent so much on to a wimpering PCI video card equivalent. As a result I've decided to ditch the VIA.

Now here's what I need from the community. I haven't built a PC from scratch in 6 years, so I don't know much about what hardware is supported and what isn't. I'd like for some mainboard suggestions. Here's my preferred requirements:
Support of DDR 400 memory.
Support of at LEAST 4x (if not 8x) AGP
Support of a P4 2.53 GHz processor
Support of 2.0 USB

Thanks in advance by the way.
Sincerely,
new VIA hater?

i've never had any problems with abit brand mobo's,
http://www.abit-usa.com/

Thanks for the suggestion rshaw.
I just checked out ABit, and looking at my notes of the boards I had spec'd out a couple of weeks ago I see that I had looked at an ABit SR7-8X and the ASUS P4G8X. Is anyone using either of these? Or know of a board similiar to these or the VIA that runs well under Linux?

I have an ABIT TH7II-RAID that works very well in LINUX although I don't have LINUX installed on it only Win98. I also have an ABIT KA7-100 that works great in LINUX. Yes, I have LINUX and Win98 installed on the KA7-100. IMO, ABIT motherboards are fast for accessing data from the hard drive than other motherboard manufactures like ASUS.

If I had to get a new motherboard to be used for LINUX. I would get an AMD based board. This is because AMD is much faster than INTEL when it comes to 16-bit code. Most of the open source programs are 16-bit.

NVidia also have LINUX modules for their motherboard chipsets (nforce 415 and nforce2 420), but many people have problems setting up LINUX on those kinds of chipsets. There is enough threads in this forum about those chipsets.

I don't recommend getting any SIS chipsets because you will have the same problems as you did with VIA chipsets.

If you don't mind re-programming your programs to be in 32-bit form and re-compiling the kernel to get some P4 features, you may want to get a P4 system. All 845 chipsets and 850E chipsets have USB version 2 and atleast 4X AGP. For your memory, get a slightly faster memory like DDR433 or faster if you are going at 400 MHz because the speed of the memory will decrease every year.

ABIT's nforce2 motherboards looks very interesting. It may handle Barton processors because of the 3 phrase voltage regulators and 12V ATX (P4) connector.

Below are good sites to check for lateast computer hardware
AnandTech
Hot Hardware
Toms Hardware

you sound like someone who really knows his hardware. Thanks for all the good info.

Well, I'm looking like you for new hardware for my new system so I started a thread where people can post the list of their hardware. Go to this thread

Thx,
Spy5600