Linux on ASRock K8Upgrade-VM800

This is a cheap motherboard here in Vancouver (Jan 2006)

So far:

CD-ROM won't boot FC4 usually - hangs saying need to give boot= argument, or init=. One time it booted with "boot=/dev/hdb" and I installed a minimal FC4 system
X11 (xorg) from FC4 won't run. No obvious reason in log.
Knoppix 3.9 runs OK
FC1 installs OK from CDrom