So I finally installed Debian.
I got myself a new and shiny box and I installed Debian. I had my old box with the 802.11g-card serving as a proxy and used my old 3com card in the new box for the install procedure.
Everything went fine. I got debian unstable on the 2.6.5 kernel up fine. X on my matrox G400 works nicely and Gnome2 looks neat.
Now over to what is not so good: the Gnome guys apparantly have a default font/encoding somewhere, that I don't know about. I just can't get my swedish 8bit letters (åäö) to work (when I use a gnome-terminal and ssh to a machine that displays them on the screen), which I believe is because I get a font that isn't ISO8859-1. In the past I could pop up the font selector and select a ISO8859-1 font. Now, I can't (the font selector doesn't include that anymore)
I had to fire up 'xterm' instead of 'gnome-terminal' to get to see those letters. I've tried to look for a global setting somewhere where I can say "I want ISO8859-1 fonts please" but so far I've failed.
I've still not gotten the motherboard sound of my A7V8X to work, but I haven't yet tried every variation I can think of. ALSA and the sounds docs in kernel/Documentation will be my guides. The boot messages indicate proper detection of my hardware and alsaconf makes the proper modules load.
Good stuff includes the wireless 'madwifi'-drivers that worked smooooothly when I moved the wifi-card from my old box to my new and had it up and working instantly. I also have the motherboard-based Via Rhine ethernet 100mbit working.