Has anyone used the Aopen AK79G MAX Motherboard? do you have any hardware issues? I was thinking about buying one. In general, does anyone use aopen motherboard for linux?

I have one, and overall I'm quite pleased with it. There are however several issues which need fixing before everything works.
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The NForce2 network driver does not support dhcp, and dies after a while.
There is currently no AGP support in the agpgart LKM. (I understand that there is in 2.5)
In order to get USB to work I have to use the fnk kernel patchset (2.4.20-pre4 is the latest), which also has a patch allowing DMA drive access. (you need both ehci-hcd and usb-ohci for USB 2+1.1).
Currently, ALSA does not support the SP/DIF outputs and inputs on the onboard sound card. The NVidia driver (OSS) does though.
Integrated GeForce4MX works fine the NVidia's drivers, but is fairly slow.
I have no idea about SATA, although I expect a patch would make it work. (the chipset by Promise [pci id=3375]
I've not tried SMBus but I think it works with the latest CVS lmsensors.
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Hope this helps.

Matt

I don't have a single problem with the nVidia network driver under Gentoo 1.4 on my 8RDA+



Patches exist for AGPGART support in both the 2.4.20 and 2.4.21 kernels. The former is provided in the latest nVidia driver pack (the .tar.gz source distribution, not the binary RPMs) and there is a link to the latter in the nForce Linux forum at nForcersHQ. I'm using the nvgart patch for 2.4.20 right now (under the aforementioned Gentoo 1.4) and it works although looking around, the 3500fps I'm getting on my 9500Pro in glxgears seems a little on the low side (I've seen 8500s get 10000 or more), I'll have to look into that.



I could have sworn I've seen some posts on nFHQ from people who claim to have SPDIF working, albeit in 2 channel mode, with the ALSA drivers. I can't confirm or deny that myself as I don't have neither digital output on my board nor a digital capable receiver/speaker system.



The hardware sensors on my 8RDA+ are working with the latest I2C/lm_sensors but different boards use different sensor chips so that's hardly a reliable indicator.