Hey!

Well, straight to the point, I have an IBM Netvista with a 2.26 GhZ Pentium 4 CPU. It works quite good with 512 RAM. However, lately Ive been thinking on exploring its performance with a range of different distros(just to see how it performs and all. The problem is that only Slackware is able to boot up. Whenever I try to boot any other installation CD's, the PC hangs when it loads the live CD kernel and/or initrd image. The distros Ive tried are the following:

Gentoo
Ubuntu
FreeBSD
and Slack(the only successful one).

I know that Slack has no problems and it is actually my fave distro, but I wanted to try Gentoo on this machine as well as FreeBSD.

So what could be the cause of the live CD's hanging(freezing when it is loading the kenel or initrd?

As another point, in gentoo I tried to boot the live CD using the "gentoo-nofb" kernel option but was not lucky. Also, I installed Gentoo on a separate hard drive, using Slackware as my host system but When I restarted to boot on Gentoo I was not able to startup since it froze as well when booting the kernel.

So, I bring this up to you guys. What could be teh reason for this problem?

Thanks for your help and anything will be greatly appreciated!

Anyone? Im desperate to install gentoo ro ubuntu or something aside Slack.

UPDATE on thhis also...I bought a nVidia FX5200 Video Card with 128MB of RAM and it works perfect for Windows yet the problem with the aforementioned distros continues, any ideas?

I tried issueing the mca-pentium no-hlt command argument to no success.

Ubuntu just restarts itself before loading the kernel from the Install CD. Gentoo just freezes when it is displaying the message "Booting kernel" or something like that, whatever it says :P

I would greatly appreciate any help you can give, THANKS!

anyone? I would really appreciate your help on this problem! Thanks!