FireWire works fine with Mandrake 9.0. USB 2.0 was not tested yet. I have 20GB IOmega Peerless drive connected to it. Do not include a mount cmd in fstab because it prevents / crashes system at booting. It mounts fine after system is up. No special driver is needed. Used Mandrake Configuration Console to partition drive. Device in 2nd port was /dev/sd5.