i have an old AMD Athlon 1133 256mb ram, 20gb Seagate hard drive on board graphics and sound the problem that I'm having is that no matter what Linux distro I'm using the installation always hangs be it Ubuntu xubuntu fedora pclinuxos any distro, puppy Linux is OK but i want to install one of the other distros why does it hang, and by the way windows goes on no problem

A bit more information would be helpful... What you've given us is like calling your mechanic and asking him over the phone why your car won't go. It could be any number of hundreds, if not thousands of problems

it goes like this, the preferred OS is xubuntu, the disk loads OK giving me my options for the installation the depending on if it's the alternate version the installation stops at trying to retrieve dash and it goes no further, with the desktop version the installation goes to the command line screen where i get told about help & documentation

with the Ubuntu 8.10 installation i get xorgserver failed to start


with the 6.06 version i get to the desktop but I've got no icons and the system is frozen,

what i have noticed is that some distros i get a BIOS age (xxxx) fails cutoff (2000), acpi=force is required to enable ACPI

on other installations there has been a problem installing cups

What happens when you try adding acpi=off to the kernel boot parameters?

i haven't tried that yet as i don't know how to but if you can explain how to do it i can give that a try and see what happens

You might be a bit low on memory for the GUI install of some distros (probably not Puppy though, as that is intended for low resource machines).

So, where there is a non-Gui install option, it would be worth trying that (alternate install in the *buntus). And combining that with acpi=off.

I don't know what causes your Problems.
I don't think it is the RAM because my one doesn't have more.
I think it has to do with the Graphic-card/chip.
I also experienced that Puppy often does better than others.
One other distribution that worked fine with me is openmamba.
Maybe that helps you.

i have tried the alternate versions of most of the distros, i've never had this problem before with any other machine i've used linux on, i've even been able to install xubuntu on a laptop that had only 96mb of ram encluding graphics and never had any problems with the installation, i'll try the openmamba distro, and see how i get on, by the way the system has onboard graphics