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Intel 865PERLL

My new desktop here at work has an 865PERLLK (The same as the above but with the Intel Pro 1000 instead of the Pro 100 onboard LAN). I'm running Debian 3.0 (Woody) which is probably about as old as any distro you will find these days. The Debian shipped kernel will install the machine but is definatly not going to perform well. I have hand compiled a recent kernel (2.4.21) and the onboard network and IDE work great. The board performs just fine for me although many reviews say the board doesn't perform as well as other i865 based boards because of the reference design nature of Intel Genuine boards. Sound didn't work at all with 2.4.21, I believe this may have been fixed in 2.4.22 but I have an SBLive in the machine so don't really care. USB/USB2 works fine (I've used an external USB2 drive enclosure on it and got 12 - 15MB/s through it). I've not tried the onboard firewire which is on this version of the board. AGP support for the i865 has also been introduced in 2.4.22 I believe, which is required if you want to do DRI accelerated 3D under X. I don't normally worry as this is a work machine. All in all I'm really happy with the board, my requirement was for a well supported (for the bits I use) board which was as stable as they come. Hence the choice of the Intel board. For a new user, I think that any board based on a i865 or i875 will either require a very new distro with 2.4.21 minimum (probably 2.4.22 for real good support) or you will need to compile your own kernel. On the other hand support for boards based on this chipset will only get better supported and I think that they are already pretty good. Jamie