The VIA VT8237 SATA chip isn't supported under any distros that i know of (except maybe mandrake). It will probably work with normal IDE support, but that would sort of defeat the purpose of the motherboard.

Apparently there are patches available HERE, but I have yet to test them.

Yes, the standard IDE Controllers work just fine, but the built-in ethernet controller shows illegal vendor on my system.

Seems to work fine with the ATA IDE controller. No problems observed under Debian Sarge, Fedora Core 1, Gentoo 1.4. I did not try the SATA controller.

SATA drives work with a BIOS update to #17 from the abit site. However SATA RAID arrays still do not work correctly. The drives are viewed seperately while in a mirror configuration. Everything else on the board works flawlessly in FC2.

Built-in sata controller are not supported on default kernel. I compiled new kernel (version 2.6.2) with sata raid, audio and lan build-in controllers support. Audio and sata works fine, but ethernet controller is not working.