Okay, so bear with me.

Completely new to Linux, wanted to install it as a secondary OS on my PC. Already have XP Home (required for work) so was attempting to partition and have dual-boot system.

However, I cannot even get FC5 to start. Don't know many of the arguments, so am kind of winging it, but always seems to crash at the following:

RIP <ffffffff80179fc8> {kmem_cache_free+88} RSP <ffff8100021f3ed8>

My machine:

Pent D 930 on D945Gnt mb
Nvidia 7600gs PCI-E
512Mb dual-core RAM

neither graphical nor text install seems to make a difference. Tried noprobe and skipddc to no avail.

BTW, booting from LG DVD-RW drive, not that that is any problem.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Maybe bad memory, use the memtest option from the installation media to check.

Maybe a bad burn for the installation media, try burning at a lower speed (less then 16 if possible).

If you have overclocked the CPU then restore the factory defaults in the BIOS.

Thanks for the advice. Had already tried that though, should have posted that, I guess, eh? lol

Tried SUSE as well, recognizing that Fedora/Red Hat and Suse are two that I recognize above all else. Similar problem. Turns out that the problem is with my 7600GS PCI-e. For some reason, the installer won't recognize that card because it sees the on board video. There is actually no way on the Intel board to disable it, only to set the bios to boot the PCI-e card first, which is what I was doing. If I ignore the 7600 card and use the onboard video, installation progresses fine. So, question becomes, is there any way to pass an argument, either to Fedora or Suse, to tell the installer to use the card instead of the on-board? I'm just afraid I'm going to go through all of this and Linux will never be able to use the 7600 card which would kind of defeat the purpose.