I'm runnign Ubuntu 8.04 x86_64.

In the recent upgrade It turned out that the latest kernel doesn't have the support for VIA82CXXX chipset, essential to MSI K8T Neo Motherboard. So I had to rebuild the kernel with oldconfig.

Is this deliberate and if I want to stick with Ubuntu do I need to be prepared to build my own kernels from now on?

In the mean while it seems that Mandriva x86_64 has decided to keep VIA chipset support and works well 'out of the box'.