hi.. this is umesh..
i am an embedded design aspirant and so i have to have linux.
i tried to install rhel-5 on my acer aspire 5920 laptop. after intallation while booting to linux an error is coming.
it is "kernel panic: not syncing Unable to mount root vfs......(0,0)..
please help me with it
i am also missing the ramdisk image file initrd-2.6.18-1.2747.el5.img.
my laptop is not also takin in rhel4 and fedora7... what to do?????

From what I can determine on google, your laptop has an intel 965 motherboard with a cor2duo processor. You need a more up to date distro to run on that hardware. Try fedora 8 or above. Also take a look at mandriva 2008.1 for another nice rpm based distro. Mandriva is a little easier to handle for someone new to linux and can be freely downloaded here:

http://www.mandriva.com/en/download/free

I have a similar setup on my desktop at home, intel 965 motherboard, core2duo processor. Fedora 8 was the first RH release that would install and run on that hardware. A lot of distros had trouble with the 965 motherboards when they first came out. All the current releases run fine on this hardware now.

It may not be so easy setting up this laptop. If nothing works out then you can try Ubuntu/Linux Mint with some help from this thread.

I almost forgot, as mentioned by kilgoretrout, pls try the latest release of any distro. For eg. if its Mint, then it should be Daryna.

Gee..thanks.. It worked!!
I'm havin a small prob with the sound, but i don't care.. Its good.. Thanks again..