I have a Dell Optiplex GX110 933MHz PIII 512MB RAM. BIOS rev A09 Onboard sound, and NIC are off. I can't turn off the onboard graphics, but it's set to auto so it initialises offboard first. I have a Linksys NIC, a SBLive! 5.0 sound card, and the IDE interface is entirely run through a Belkin UATA133 PCI-IDE controller using a sii chipset, and I recently replaced a Savage4 32MB PCI card with a 64MB Diablotech ATI Radeon 9000 PCI card. Now I can't boot modern kernels. My old etch netinst cd using 2.6.15 and a knoppix with 2.6.12 seem unaffected but a current Kubuntu 7.10 or Lenny CD, or the already installed system (Kubuntu 7.10) will not boot. I get at the furthest to where it's checking if the initram disc is initramfs before everything halts. Most of the time I'm only getting to "PCI: Cannot allocate resource region 4 of device 0000:00:1f.2 followed by the same line except 0000:00:1f.1.

I've googled for the problem but couldn't make sense out of the very few answers I could get that appeared to be both relevent and in english.

What gives? Is there an easy answer to this, or does linux get stuck with the old crappy graphics and windoze gets the new shiny ones?

Keep googling and maybe run a couple of searches on the forums here at LQ.

I have. repeatedly. about half of the answers are in languages I don't speak. Of the other half most of those are unrelated -- those people can get to a working system just not able to get X or 3D accel working. Of the remaining people talking about kernel problems, they're not with this computer or graphics card, but similar enought that if it wasn't written entirely in programmer I might have found an answer -- but I couldn't follow enough of it to be sure they are describing a similar problem, nor was I exactly clear on whether they found a solution or not.