Well I haven't made a lot of Linuxish progress on my new system.
The essential problems which make it difficult to install any Linux on it are:-
The JMicron PATA controller isn't recognised by install versions of the Linux kernel. There is (I believe) support for it in the latest 2.6.18 kernel but the problem is how to get that kernel built on the system.
The Realtek Gigabit RTL 8168 NIC interface isn't supported in current kernels. A driver is available but needs to be, yes you've guessed it, compiled into a new kernel.
I have currently got Windows XP64 Professional installed in a partition on the new system, that was moderately easy though one has to feed it several floppys during the install and it's a bit of a guessing game which ones should be used at times. So, anyway, I have at least proved the system works and can copy stuff to and fro even if only in Window'ish formats.
I need to come up with a strategy for getting a basic system onto my new box that will then allow me to compile a new kernel with the required bits in it.
One question this raises is one that I originally asked - what Linux version should I choose? The original answers here were along the lines of "try them all" but I really don't fancy having to recompile kernels for all of them (and I don't believe one recompiled kernel will work for all, each distribution will almost inevitably have its own tweaks I believe). I think the three choices are Suse, Ubuntu or Mandriva. Suse 10.1 seems to have the fullest support for Vmware Server so, if nothing else seems to point elswhere, I may go for Suse.
So, how do I get a system loaded? The options would seem to be:-
Get the distribution files onto the disk using Windows XP and install from there. Question - can Linux installers read Windows file systems?
Add a "well known" NIC to the system (I have spare PCI slots) and do a network install, this I think may be the simplest approach.
Do a USB drive install (I'm not sure I have a big enough USB memory thingy).
Any comments or ideas?