This motherboard's specification can be found at http://uk.asus.com/products4.aspx?modelmenu=2&model=493&l1=3&l2=11&l3=0

I've been able to get this working pretty nicely under Gentoo. You can find details here:

http://www.solace.net/nash/p5wd2-premium.html

The problem with the mobo's PCI/SATA controller is that the ICH7 chipset isn't recognized by the latest kernel. I have a simple patch for the kernel that fixes this:

*** linux-2.6.12.3/drivers/pci/quirks.c Fri Jul 15 17:18:57 2005
--- linux-2.6.12.3-pcipatch/drivers/pci/quirks.c        Fri Jul 22
13:50:43 2005***************
*** 1199,1204 ****
--- 1199,1205 ----
        case 0x2680:    /* ESB2 */
                ich = 6;
                break;
+       case 0x27b8:
        case 0x27c0:
        case 0x27c4:
                ich = 7;

There's a firmware upgrade available at Asus.com, but I haven't installed it for lack of a useful DOS book disk just at the moment. It's possible that applying that patch would fix the unrecognized ICH7 chip without the kernel patch.

There are three disk controllers on the motherboard (sheesh) including the ICH7. However, I believe that the ICH7 is also the PCI controller and needs to be recognized. But, the other two controllers appears to be recognized-- one is a ITE UDMA133 and one a SiS SATA controller.

There are other minor annoyances, at the moment. The ACPI implementation appears to have some issues and so I needed to boot 2.6.12 with the 'irqpoll' kernel option. Else, my NetGear MA311 / Prism 2.5 wireless card wouldn't work reliably.

Installing a working Gentoo is always a bit like bit-level alchemy turning a bucket of bits into something useful. My installation process involved creating my own LiveCD that I then used to download the basic Gentoo stage2 tarball and portage snapshot. After that, it was more or less all straight from the Gentoo x86 handbook.

I suspect it would be significantly harder to get a working RedHat or other RPM-based distribution. However, it's possible that creating the right kernel/initrd would allow one to run the install scripts from the CD-ROM. Dunno, as I switched to Gentoo for everything a year or so ago.

Feel free to e-mail if you have any questions or need help. I can post a kernel config.gz for 2.6.12 if anyone needs it.

Freebsd 5.4 release , Geom Mirror enabled
No problems thus far. 2 x 80 SATA 1 on each channel.

I can't speak to whether or not ASUS is Linux friendly, because I haven't really had any dealings with their tech support people.

However, my experience differs from the previous poster. I have everything working nicely on my Redhat FC4 system. Both LAN ports, internal sound, etc.

I did not have to do anything special. I just installed Redhat FC4 (from a single-DVD) and have a nice dual-processor x86_64 system with 1GB of fast dual-channel DDR memory.

A couple of "yum update" executions later and everything is up-to-date. There was an interim kernel that had ACPI problems and would not boot, but that was not really a problem that was just for this motherboard.

---Kayvan