I have just bought a new system to set up for a friend. Quite straightforward Asrock G41MH-GE motherboard with a HANNspree 23" monitor.
It's been a right royal pain to get going as much because of the silly monitor and BIOS setups as because of a kernel/Intel incompatibility.
The monitor initially seems pretty standard with on screen setup and buttons to move through the menus but the real pain is that if there is no signal input you can't activate the menu. It actually tells you this in the manual, I didn't believe it at first but it really is true.
I had set the monitor to VGA input (it's dual VGA and HDMI) but (for various reasons, see below) I had the HDMI lead connected. Hit the 'menu' button and notheing happens because there's no input on the VGA connector, sort of Catch22 really, I had to actually connect something to send it a VGA signal to let me get the menu up to switch it to DVI input. OK, it would *probably* have managed itself if I'd left it at Auto input select but we wanted to specifiy which input was being used.
Then onto the BIOS on the Asrock motherboard. The boot options only appear for a very short time, too short to actually read them so you have to look in the manual to find it's F2 to get the BIOS setup. The real oddity though is that the splash screen (with the options) *only* appears after a power on, hitting the reset button doesn't show it so then you are really in the dark. I've never come across a motherboard where hitting reset doesn't produce the same effect as power on.