On 11/7/2013 9:48 PM, Arun Khan wrote: > Gigabyte does list Linux for their boards, albeit as caveat -- an example here: > <http://www.gigabyte.in/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4388#sp> > > I would suggest select a board that has been in the market for about 6 > months. Look up the chipset on the board and verify support for it > in the Linux kernel. Also, besides costing a little less it will > most likely work with the latest incarnate of the OS. with this years's Haswell CPUs (core i3/i5/i7-4xxx), your chipset choice is the Z87 or its cheapened cousins, H87, Q87, H81, Q85 with last years Ivy Bridge CPUs (core i3/i5/i7-3xxx), it's the Z77, H77, Q77, Q75 and so forth. both of these chipset families provide SATA3 channels, USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports. many motherboards have an additional non-intel SATA chip for more ports. my Z77 has a partial NIC on it, but the motherboard I'm using has a different Realtek NIC instead many ivy bridge and haswell CPUs have onboard video supported by these chipsets, and I believe Intel has decent video drivers for linux, but you said you're running shell only, so that doesn't even matter you probably don't care about sound chips. so, its mostly the extra SATA chip, and the NIC chip you'll be concerned with for compatibility. -- john r pierce 37N 122W somewhere on the middle of the left coast