i'm running suse10.2 64bit on a asus-m2a-vm mobo and a 3600+ x2 proc with kde and i must say overall performance is very bad. But it was the only distribution who wanted to install anyway (had to say brokenmodules=atiixp), debian and ubuntu just crashed during install. It takes grub about 15 minutes to load untill the bzimage and I have to cntrl-alt-backspace the desktop often because the desktop doesn't respond, something must be very wrong but i dont know what. Also the onboard vga doesn't seem to be supported, ati radeon x1250, could that be the bottleneck? it runs only as vesa on 800x600 now.

VESA sure is slow. Try first changing the display driver from 'vesa' to 'radeon' if you're using a Radeon card. Restart X and see if it helped a bit. It's not giving you 3d direct rendering, but it's better than VESA and I take it that you'd like to get the other problems solved before going to campaign against the ATI proprietary driver, if at all.

Firstly it would be nice to know why the other operating systems failed to install. Did you try, for example, Ubuntu Alternate Install disc? Or safe graphics options, low resolution/colour-depth and nosplash with Ubuntu?

If GRUB is that slow (if it really is GRUB and not something else), then you do have problems. GRUB should be fast, though your kernel might be slow booting. Note that 64-bit system doesn't give you any better performance unless the software can take advantage of the 64-bit system..

What do the system logs (under /var/log) say, or 'dmesg' from a terminal? Difficult to help with these details..have you tried if some live-cd Linux runs more smoothly, for example Knoppix? Try out if you can..

oke, the errors i get during install are:
fedora7 -> hangs on /sbin/loader
ubuntu -> /bin/sh can't access tty: job control turned off (initramfs)
debian -> kernel panic: not syncing. Aiee, killing interrupt handler

strange, suse though will install, so i'll just stick to that..

allright, thanks to this link http://nl.opensuse.org/Howto/ATI_Driver, I was able get some graphics support for the onboard video chip, ati radeon x1250. My acer tft screen, al1715, wasn't in the supported list in yast, so it still ran on vesa 800x600, but i discovered it was compatible with the 1555.
Some kind of progress, but booting time is still bad, and i don't understand suse's memory management. Like it just uses all it can get to cache data, while debian seems to use the least possible which I prefer.