Let me rephrase my statement.
There are no drivers supplied by ABit for the motherboard, specifically, except
for a "less than desirable" driver for the onboard soundchip.
The INF driver they supply is only for Windoze.
The 3COM nic driver is only for Windoze.
The onboard Audio driver for Linux is the alc-0115.tar.bz2, and you can do much
better at
ALSA's homepage.
The USB 2.0 driver is only for Windoze 98SE/ME.
All of these, and other settings related to your motherboard, will have
to be configured via your kernel.
To determine which is your actual soundchip, run "lspci" as root and you'll get a
list of your PCI devices. That will also give you your 3COM nic chipset. Since you
have sound and an internet connection, they are probably fine just as they are.
Your motherboard is an Intel 865PE chipset, built for a P4 CPU - but which one
to choose in the kernel configuration depends upon which CPU is on your board.
The "chipset drivers" that Dale mentions are settings in your Linux kernel, not
something you're going to be able to install by inserting your ABit mobo CD...
In your kernel, there is support for a lot of devices that you don't have on your
motherboard. This is similar to Windoze, where you'll have drivers for maybe 300
different CD-RWs, but you only have one in your computer.
To make the Linux system boot faster, and run better, we recompile the kernel
and take out the support for devices we don't have. And we optimize the support
for the devices that we do have. (For instance, you may have a PIV CPU, but your
kernel may be configured for a PIII or another CPU.)
Some of these things aren't going to give you much of a noticeable performance
increase, unless you run some benchmark utilities (and find out how small the
difference between PIII and PV support is actually).
Another reason to recompile the kernel is to get a piece of hardware supported.
For instance, in Slackware 10.0 the default 2.4.26 kernel does not have support
for my onboard Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet nic. To get it to work I must recompile
my kernel. Some devices you can get to work by inserting the proper module, and
for others nothing but recompiling the kernel will work.
Me and the ftc will have to work on it. They do work on that you know.
