Well, this has been plauging me for months, and finally figured it out.
Any 2.6 kernel on my board, would boot, then give errors (paraphrased,
sorry) when I tried to bring up the ethernet:
NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0: transmit timed out
IRQ #18: Nobody cared!
And no ethernet conectivity.
The Fix: Update bios from asus' website. I guess their ACPI was screwed
up. This is the second time I've had to update this MB to fix
incompatibilities with Linux. So, watch out with Asus boards on Linux.
BTW - Linux 2.4's driver worked fine with the old bios. Only 2.6 didn't
work.