[plug] All in 1 motherboards

[Kev]

Milan,

  I have an MSI KM2M Combo -L with an AMD Athlon XP 2100+ on it.  (I 
view Intel as the hardware equivalent of M$ !!)  It has a Via KM266 
chipset, S3 Pro-Savage DDR video set, AC97 sound (Realtek ALC650), Via 
Rhine II fast ethernet, in fact on-board everything.  Mandrake 10 
community and Mandrake 10 release both install flawlessly (release is 
better), detect ALL of my hardware and set it up properly.  I also have 
a PCI RAID card installed which it will automagically detect and set up 
correctly.  The only thing it trips on is that it always says I have a 
Sony 15SF2, when in fact I have a Sony 17SF2.  That doesn't make any 
functional difference and it's easy to correct.

The bst part is that you said, "I am trying to put together a computer 
on a rather limited budget."  I did my whole thing in Jan this year 
using 2nd hand bits for about $320.00.  I had to buy 256M of RAM to make 
it up to the 512M I now have, and later on I bought a new 120G HDD.  I 
use the RAID card not as a RAID card but just for the tertiary and 
quartenary IDE channels.  It was the cheapest way to use the 40M, 30M, 
8M and 6M x 2 HDDs I had lying around.

Hope this gives you some hope of your own.  Contact me if you'd like 
some detail/help.

Cheers
Kev Downes