Just picked up the VIA EPIA M9000 Motherboard and the following
Mini Case.

This is going to be for my MythTV project.

I ran into some problems installing Mandrake 9. Notes are in the article.

I found that Mandrake 9 had the best support for sound for this VIA motherboard. I could not get the supplied drivers to install, or was getting crackly sound.

When I first tried installing Mandrake 9, I was getting package install errors, and then the install of the boot loader would just fail. After some digging around I found some article describing that Mandrake 9 had a bug that did not support i586 based boards properly.

To work around this, do a normal install, and then after you select your packages, click the Details button to see the different packages installing.
The glibc package should be one of the first you see. Once you see this ‘ALT F2′ to get a shell prompt.
Type the following to delete the i686 directory.
rm -rf /mnt/lib/i686
Then do a ‘ALT F7′ to get back to the install screen.
Now Mandrake should compile everything in i586 mode and not i686 and everything should install fine.

Cheers..