Well if you're only going to use IDE devices, you can just use Kubuntu Feisty 7.04 and get a good experience with LMCE without all the breakage. 

All I can tell you is that that is not supposed to happen.  Are you sure the ISO's you downloaded are not corrupt and properly burned to CD?

There are some known problems with the SATA controller on that specific mainboard and the kernel version used by (K)Ubuntu < 7.10, please see the Asus M2A-VM wikipage for more details.

At the moment I'm using an IDE drive without problems.  And I have just patched up the driver in the "old" Kubuntu kernel source (I want to use more then 4GB of memory so I need to recompile anyway), seems to work ok so far, but it's a little early to draw any conclusions.  There could be all sorts of breakage in the stuff I don't use (yet).

Please have a look at http://wiki.linuxmce.com/index.php/Category:Hardware it's not much yet, but it is growing.

If you could add to wiki or at least post here about what you had to do to get it working, it would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Sure, no problem, there you go: VOIP with XS4All

I might do one on setting up the speedtouch modem's phone ports to connect to LMCE as well.

Yeah I used the AMP interface from pluto-admin, it can be a bit tricky unless you know what you're actually doing, which I'm not, but I'll try to add at least instructions for my specific provider to the wiki.

I ran into a loop at one point according to the logs.  Apparently that can happen when the "inbound route" to "Use 'Incoming Calls' settings" (that could even be the default if none are specified!).  Other then that it was just a matter of finding the right values for the right fields, and all the pieces fell into place.

[seem]

I noticed some errors being reported in some bootscripts, but when I looked at the scripts in question, everything seemed fine.

I recall having similar issues, tests giving errors in scripts while they shouldn't, with some of my own shellscripts (on another Kubuntu install).  I ended up making /bin/sh a symlink to bash instead of dash as changing #!/bin/sh to #!/bin/bash in the scripts didn't work for me either.

I have done the same thing on my LMCE's Kubuntu, and things seem to be running a lot smoother.  Has anyone else noticed this? 

The command to change this is:
root@dcerouter:~# ln -sf bash /bin/sh

Substitute bash with dash to restore the default, and watch out for typing errors.

Well there's a start in the wiki:

http://wiki.linuxmce.com/index.php/Category:Hardware

Actually several of them...

Aparently Grub can do PXE: http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/html_node/Diskless.html#Diskless

But I'm guessing that it won't be easy to make a .XBE out of Grub.

Another possible option might be PXELinux: http://syslinux.zytor.com/pxe.php

Not only have I managed to get the voip form my ISP working, but I also managed to get the phone ports on their modem to connect to LMCE's Asterisk instead.  Now to figure out how tie in it's PSTN line as well...

It would still be nice to add them to the list of phone providers though, all in due time I guess.

If you go to the "devices tree" in the LinuxMCE Admin Website you can see that the top level devices have MAC- and IP- addresses specified, maybe this is what you're looking for?

I was just thinking the other day that it would be nice to run the core as a regular system deamon (or "service").  That way you could have a seperate choice which user interface, LMCE (with or without KDE/other desktop) for a hybrid or KDE/other/none for a core, to run on that machine afterwards.

Unfortunately I'm not that familiar with the Kubuntu bootscripts (yet), let alone the way LMCE (Pluto) does things, so thanks for the pointers.

Maybe this is what you're looking for.

http://wiki.linuxmce.com/index.php/Create_my_own_skins_or_GUI_for_LinuxMCE

You should either try LinuxMCE-1.0 on Ubuntu 6.10 or (preferably) LinuxMCE-1.1 Beta2 on Kubuntu-7.04, those are the currently supported platforms. 

To answer your edit, yes this seems to be normal. I have tried setting it to read-only, but that didn't stop the scripts from destroying a working setup either.

And if a "helper" script offers to fix things for you... better say no, also funny how it starts the MD anyway when you hit cancel in that dialog (contrary to the message).  As far as I can tell this is the only issue that really needs fixing before LMCE can hit the big time.