Hello Linux distro gurus, I have downloaded Fedora and Mandrake distros. I burned the ISO's onto CDs. I created boot floppy disks where necessary. I have not succeeded in getting either of these distros to install. I have approached forums with the errors conditions with no response. Which distro will download and install. I have various intel boxes to use as the target hardware. Hardware of choice: Compaq Proliant ML 350 but I will settle for any intel based machine. I have access to various different hardware from generic to brandname. Please advise.

Exactly where did you get stuck?
Did the installation process not start?
If it did, what was the last thing you saw before it stopped?

It seems Proliants tend to be a bit tricky when it comes to installing Linux, so my first suggestion would be to try something more generic for now. In general you should not need floppies most of the time, unless your hardware is so old it will not boot from CDROM, or so unusual the installer can't recognise the CDROM drive, which again, does not happen very often these days.
So my first question would be, are you sure you burned your CD as BOOTABLE CDs?

get a junk shop computer for about $20.00 USD
for the hard drive pull it out put it into another computer for the downloads
then put it into the computer you are installing on use the boot floppys
the harddrive is so much faster than CDs its worth the effort and much less prone
to errors than the downloade burn process or just buy the CDs