New Motherboard Problems

The new motherboard has managed to evade all attempts to successfully install a completely working copy of Linux. Some distros like PC Linux and FC 8 could not even mount the live CD. PCLinux stopped with an explicit message that the Live CD could not be mounted. FC8 gave a different error that seemed to point that it did not take the onboard IDE controller as a friend. Some ATA... error.
Other distros that I tried - Mandriva, Centos, Sabayon, Opensuse - all failed to tackle the net connection. The onboard Realtek gigabit network card proved too much. But, in all other aspects they were successful.

Salvation came in the name of Belenix. The only hiccup was in the X configuration, since this took time and a lot of trial and error and restarts. What aggravated the situation was that I could not login from the console to try editing the conf file manually. The username password combination remained elusive - root, user, password etc were tried out.

Eventually the combination that worked involves using the Vesa drive and not the Nvidia driver, and reducing the colour depth to 16 bit. The network problem was addressed beautifully, and here I am typing this. The resolution remains at 800 x 600, for which the only solution is a manual edit of the xorg.conf file since Belenix does not offer the proper graphical tools to tweak X.

The default combo is user and belenix.