Thanks,

Max

Thanx

The problem likely has something to do with Intel's implementation of ACPI, because on the same board OpenSolaris will install but when booting the new installation off the hard disk it panics, and Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop complains about ACPI with "ACPI invalid PBLK length" messages but still installs, loads and runs.

"Hackintosh" Apple OS X however, reportedly installs and runs without problems on these boards. I've loaded Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop 64-bit onto this board and will use it to host KVM instead for our bake off, and will evaluate ESXi off a board selected from the ESX whitebox HCL list. Lesson learned: ESX is a lot more sensitive to hardware variances than Debian strains of Linux. If someone at VMWare wants to play around with a sample D5400XS board populated with processor, heatsink and RAM and with the power supply, we have an extra one we won't need on our bench for 4-5 months that we can lend for the engineers to poke and prod to see if they can figure out why ESXi won't load from it.