Hello Everyone and thanks in advance for any help you provide.

Trying to install Suse Linux personal 8.2 on an old Pentium class machine that was running Win95. From a dos startup disck I formatted the C drive and ran the linux install from proprietary CD's. During the initial read from the discs (about 20-30 lines of text scroll the screen), it stops at loading "tmps files..." (they may not be verbatim). Then, after several minutes the installation aborts and there's mention of "Bad Kernel Panic."

I had installed Suse Linux from the same CD's onto a compaq Win98 laptop and a pentium III windows me machine with no such problems about year ago when I bought the Suse Linux personal 8.2 cd's.

The machine I'm trying to install the linux operating system on now are heavily used PC's that were replaced and discarded at my high school. Myself and a couple of students pieced together 3 PC's with new CD ROM drives and thought they may perform better with the linux kernel.

We have had the same installation problems on every machine.

We reinstalled windows 95 with no such problems.

Is this just a compatability issue?

The stock kernel may lack support for your motherboard.
... or, I remember once I had similar problem when trying to install W98 into a brand-name computer. I investigated the problem and found out there was a restriction written into custom BIOS they used, allowing to install only W95 or NT4. Overwriting the BIOS was a royal struggle, soldering iron was involved.
I would add you probably won't be happy with the speed of XFree in these computers. They are great to have fun with CLI of course.
Good luck.

Forgive my simple question. What do you mean by Xfree and CLI?
Also is there a way in which we can see if there is such a restriction in the bios?

XFree is a server running on *nix, providing GUI.
CLI stands for command line interface.

Maybe some search on Internet can give you something about that BIOS, you have to know the name of the brand where your m/b comes from.