nVidia has made a name for itself amongst the enthusiastic community with both motherboards and graphics cards. Their nForce chipset is pretty much THE choice for an AMD enthusiast and with its latest model, the nForce4, nVidia brings about some very interesting technologies to their chipset like PCI Express and SATA2. MSI has always been very quick in adopting nVidia technologies.
My system specs are:
If you have not downloaded the latest NFORCE drivers, go ahead and do so. After downloading them do "sh NFORCE-Linux-ARCH-VERSION-pkg1.run" to install the network driver and sound driver. The installer will prompt you with varios questions. Make sure you select to have it build a kernel module for you.
If you get an error when it tries to install the sound module just let it be. We'll come back to that later.
Alright, so you've run the package. I usually reboot at this point, but it is not required. You should be able to do an "lsmod" and see something similar to "nvnet 68644 0" that is the Nforce NIC module. "ifconfig -a" should reveal eth0 if your iface settings are correct (/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf on slackware). For getting the sound working move on. If it is not working double check your network settings, then 'modprobe nvnet'.
To this day the driver for the onboard audio controller still does not work well at all. Here is some lspci output concerning the controller:
01:0d.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs SB Audigy LS
Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.: Unknown device 1009
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 17
I/O ports at d700 [size=32]
Capabilities: [dc] Power Management version 2
I do not even bother installing the NFORCE sound module. I go straight to the ALSA source and build from scratch. The alsa-project website is a great resource for just about every audio card there is out there. Follow the instructions and you cannot go wrong! When you have done that don't forget to run alsaconf and alsamixer to set the volume.. Usually a reboot is required to get it working.
The ca0106 driver does support analog or digital input, so this means no microphone input. Yea, it sucks, I know.
Being a very poor fellow I only have one 7800GTX, and not two so I am unable to offer any advice on this point. Though if you would like to donate some money so I can purchase another and give you a writeup, please contact me. :)