It's time again, I have to buy a new mainboard.
Since I'm using Linux, not only price and performance are relevant, so:

Which is the best mainboard with socket 7 (Athlon) with KT600 or nforce2 chipset in combination with X11 on Linux?

Which one comes with full support (drivers for LAN, sound, etc.) for Linux (since I want to support the companies, which support Linux)?

I've seen various SATA/RAID-threads; is there actually a SATA which works out of the box with Linux?

Any Good?

Bodo

Isn't socket 7 for the older Pentiums?

Socket 7 is for Intel Pentium MMX chips and AMD K6 chips

AMD Athilon and Duron chips use the Socket A format

As for motherboards, I have been looking at the Abit NF7-S and Asus A7N8X-Delux. As for compatability, I'm not 100% sure, but they look like good boards. They are both nForce chipset boards.

Second question KT600?? The last time I checked the latest chipset out by via is the KT400a, no?

KT600 is out... few links:
http://hardocp.com/article.html?art=NTEw
http://www.digital-daily.com/motherboard/msi-kt6-delta/
http://www.3dvelocity.com/reviews/kt6delta/kt6delta.htm

Yes, you're right; small error occured there. Of course, I mean the current Athlons

Check my sig below. I have not had any problems except that the kernal or something doesn't support agpgart. Can't get a stable system when using NVIDIA drivers. Other than that it has ethernet, sound, UDMA133 hardware monitor for CPU etc and other stuff.

I don't recommend the SATA just yet. I have seen people who have had problems with it. Some can't get it to see the drives to install on to begin with. Might want to wait a bit. Hopefully next release for some. Mandrake 9.2????

Hope this helps. It is best to get advise on hardware before you buy. Learn from someboby else's mistake type of thing.

The only problem I found with a nforce chipset was the sound.It works but the support from nvidia only exists for the soundstorm chipset.
BTW - dalek how is your FX5200 doing - my FX5600 (also chaintec) is about to die.Well it's been 3 month.I suppose that's ok.

This mostly for Bodo
sata works well on the asus a7n8x dx.
I got gentoo to run well on it but i had to use the nvida lan driver.
I am running 2.6.0test4.

As to the mainboard question, I haven't had any trouble with my Asus A7N8X-X w/AMD Athlon XP+2400 Thoroughbred.

The only thing: Red Hat 9.0 setup didn't detect the onboard ethernet automatically, though Control Center displays it correctly.

crashmeister: It works and when it's working it really takes a load off my CPU. I run 1280x1024. It looks great. I ran 1600 for a while but it gives me a headache because everything is so small.

I would recommend the card as to it works fine. I'm not absolutely sure where the agpgart problem lies though. I think it's really a software issue. Either way, it ticks me off. I got everything setup so that I don't need to ever shutdown, short of power fail for a long time or hardware changes, and then this crash crap comes along.

Well. I hope they fix a driver or kernal patch or whatever. As stated earlier, if I wanted problems with crashing, I would have installed windoze.

I'm trying not to rant here. It's hard though!!!!!

Mandrake is less stable than windows if y want an easy disteo try Suse.

Debian Slackwaer or Gentoo will teah y how linux realy works