I've been a Microsoft whore all my life. Back from the days of Dos 1.0 through to XP today. I finally decided to give Linux a shot. I am starting to understand the appeal. It's like living in the old DOS days where everything had to be tweaked and loaded manually.

My experience...

Supermicro P3DM3, 512Mb RAM, dual 1Ghz CPU, onboard SCSI U160 with a CD rom and Seagate 18Gb drive.

Started with Redhat 8.0. Install would work fine until I said partion the drive automatically. At that point the install would abort and I'd get a restart message. Great. Then tried Disk Druid. Allowed me to continue the install until it started loading packages. At about the 20% mark it would freeze. Keyboard and mouse were responsive but the rest of the system was locked. Had the same thing 3 times.

OK, decided to try a Lycoris build. After 5 hours of installing it told me to restart the system. On restart I was told there is no boot partion. Tried again, same thing.

I then tried Mandrake. 9.0. Got as far as loading program into memory. After 3 hours and about 30% done I aborted.

Next was FreeBSD. Same thing, wouldn't intstall anything and I got a blank screen with no error message.

After much searching on the web I saw that the adaptec aic7xxx driver seems to be buggy. Try as hard as I could but I could find a fix, or if I did, it didn't tell me how to apply it.

OK, I'm IT savvy, I'll find a way around it. Suspecting it was a SCSI timing issue, I created a Redhat bootnet floppy and tracked down a public image I could onstall over the wire. Ran the install and success !!!!!!! Redhat 8.0 Installed.

BUT..............

Now the system can't load my Ethernet adaptor (onboard)(which it did fine with the bootnet floppy). How ironic. SCSI didn't work when I tried a SCSI install. Now the network doesn't work when I complete a network install.

I am now at a loss to try and fix the network driver. The logs say IFUP failed.no link present, Check cable.

OK, cable is in and it worked an hour ago. I really am at a loss to find the problem. I tried guessing that the Net Gear FM114P router I have isn't talking to Linux via DHCP (though it did with the floppy) but the routers logs show nothing and a scan on the net didn't reveal anyone having the same problem.

So, here I am. Committed to trying Linux and wanting to believe it is better, but my experience would drive a less persistent (read: Non-geek) person away from Linux never to return.

Anyway, there it is. I thought sharing these frustrations might be useful to the Linux community and maybe shed some light on why MS will continue to dominate the market despite everyone's best efforts.

I have not given up yet and will continue to get this working. It's fun for me. Reminds me of the old days when computing was trial and error.

Now if anyone can help me with this network problem I would be most thankful......

Try recompiling with the very latest drivers, update your kernel to the latest build.

Windows is overrated. The other day I upgraded my mobo and reinstalled 2k, the stupid logitech webcam installer wouldn't finish installing. There's no instructions as to how since it's OEM. One month has passed. The problem is still here. I got the installer installed, but it would not fix the yellow question mark icon in device manager. No you can't install the driver cuz the driver is built into the installer. Talk about catch 22. No I can't uninstall the installer, cuz it wouldn't let me with a very user friendly warning saying the install wasn't finished. Excellent!

And I tried Win98, but part of the mobo software wouldn't install. Webcam isn't as important as the mobo.

Have you turned off PnP OS Aware and ACPI in BIOS?

What's your specs?

Manage to overcome my problem by configuring a static IP, connecting up and downloading the updated RPMs. re-configuring eth0 to use DHCP and now everything works.

Jetblackz, never did I say Windows is faultless, I would be stupid to do so. But in my experience in trying to get this thing started, it would have driven away many windows users from Linux never to return.