The three components of the motherboard that you are likely to need special (usually binary) drivers from outside the kernel for are graphics, network and sound. These are described in more detail below. I have a Gigabyte GA-7N400Pro motherboard and this page is based on my experiences with that.

First of all download the nvidia driver package from the following URL (You may want to check for a more recent version)

http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=linux_nforce_1.0-0261

Graphics

See RadeonOnNforce for more information on getting graphics cards work on a nForce2 based board.

Network

The network controller on nForce2 based boards only works with a binary driver called nvnet that is supplied by nvidia in the package above. This seems to work fine and give reasonable performance.

Sound

I've heard of people (CraigBox, PhilMurray) getting sound working on a nForce2 board using both the i810_audio module in the kernel and also with the nvidia supplied binary module from the package above. I've not been able to get this running successfully yet using either module. The nVidia binary module locks the machine solid, and i810_audio produces no sound despite everything appearing to work correctly.

Other Notes

IDE Controller

I had some fun getting my hard disk running in a decent mode with my motherboard. It seems that the IDE "fixes" applied between 2.4.20 and 2.4.21 have broken compatibility for the nForce2 IDE chipset and you can only get 16-bit PIO mode. I've not yet investigated exactly what changed between the two kernels to break this.