With a stock Mandrake 9 install I could not get the nvidia graphics drivers to run for a long time. (Nor could i get the nv driver to work. The only driver that worked was the framebuffer driver.)
The main problem seems to be the current bios (1.004). Downgrading to 1.001 allowed the nvidia binary drivers to work. (I think I found this suggested solution on Nvidia's bulletin board.) I sent an email to Asus asking them to fix their current bios, but well I wouldn't count on that. A friend of mine said that abit's nforce counterpart doesn't have those problems in linux. I don't know how it would work with Mandrake. At any rate I don't think its a cooker problem, but perhaps knowing this will help someone. If there is interest I can post my installation steps for Mandrake 9. One cooker problem I did see, is the installer found the nforce network card, but wasn't able to load it. Installing the nvidia binary nforce drivers and doing a drakconnect fixed all that. The nforce chipset seems to make a very nice small server, once you get all the drivers to work. -Robert
