Hello experts.

I had Suse Linux 9.2 installing and running for quite some time on a cheap AMD Sempron no brand machine.
I wanted to upgrade my HW and got a brand new

Fujitsu Siemens Scaleo P
Intel® Pentium® D 820.
Ram 1024 MB.
Hard Disk 250 GB SATA.
Video Nvidia GeForce 7300SE TC a 512 MB.
Sinto TV + Remote Control.
Card Reader 11in1
USB mouse and USB keyboard
Windows Media Center.

In order not to overwrite Windows Media Center (one day I may need it), I took off the SATA drive, and installed a Maxtor IDE 160 M internal Hard disk drive.I changed the BIOS and the new HD is correctly recognized.

Then I Started Linux from the DVD 1 distribution, it goes through the language selection, and the configuration of all options including HD partitioning. It then starts to format the swap partition and then the other partition.

At this point in time after about 20 seconds with the clock going, everything freezes, the clock stop turning and I cannot do anything but switch off and try again.

I searched everywhere over the Internet, disable the ACPI support, disable the SATA support, nothing happened.

In a desperate attempt to have something running I put a Kubuntu distribution CD on the Scaleo and.... it installed without problems at the first try!?

Can you tell me what the problem is? There are many brands of Linux around but I wanted to go for some nice combination of HW manufacturers (Fujitsu Siemens) and SW (Novell - SUSE)

What am I doing wrong? (Please help as I have lost several days to overcome this problem)

I do not want to go back to Windows, please....

Massimo

What you are doing wrong is trying to install suse 9.2

Try with 10.1 or the most up to date version of any OS, not versions they wrote years ago and don't even support anymore.

The way I read it, the obvious answer is to install Kubuntu....

I think that Linux distro have all become more robust recently--in terms of recognizing HW and doing the right thing. This aside, it seems plausible that an older distro such as SUSE 9.2 would have issues with new hardware---still surprising that it hangs.

I've never liked SUSE--and now isn't Novell moving to Gnome vs KDE?

Seriously consider a modern Debian-based system such as Ubuntu (Kubuntu for KDE) or Mepis (actually based on Ubuntu, but uses KDE)

If your swapping distro's take a peak at sabayonlinux.org as well, comes loaded with drivers...

Isn't Sabayon relatively new??
Do you regard it as mature and stable?

Sabayon is gentoo. The install method is new, the distro is not I don't appear to be having any problems... desktop's been up for 3 weeks straight...

Ah yes--now I remember why I did not like it. I would not wish Gentoo on anyone--much less a newcomer-bee.

Any new distro - SuSE Debian Ubuntu Slack Mandriva !! Vector !! (I love suggesting Vectorlinux) ... .

Distrowatch you could of course also look at