I am soon possibly going to be switching to an nForce 2 chipset, and I was wondering about the situation regarding NVIDIA's proprietary drivers. Must I use these to get sound and lan working in Linux? I ask this because I don't want to :

1) rely on proprietary drivers that could be a load of rubbish for all I know.
2) reinstall the drivers everytime I compile a new kernel.

Basically I am wondering if there are any open source variants available (I have an NVIDIA gfx card and I'm ok about installing those drivers each time, but and lan and sound and whatever else is taking the mickey :-) ).

Many Thanks,
KingPhillius

Lan and sound work with the drivers in the kernel (forcedeth and alsa) with the known limitations for sound.There are some issues with some mobos but the 2.6.7 kernel seems to have fixed those.

I use an Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard with NForce2 chipset with Mandrake 10.0 (2.6.3 kernel) without problems.