Linux refuses to even INSTALL. No matter which distro I use it cannot load the kernel (tried Gentoo, Ubuntu, and I may have tried SuSE). I was almost certain that the mobo was causing the trouble, since I bought a shitty 50$ ECS or something. Nope! I replaced it with a decent MSI board and the same damn thing happens. Unless there are some magical things you need to do to your computer I have no clue what is wrong. All of the hardware is standard, and lower-end.

Since I don't know, I would say every piece of hardware is a problem since apparently it wasn't the motherboard

Socket AM2,
MSI Motherboard with nvidia chipset
512 mb ddr2 ram
pci-x graphics card, not sure what kind right now
CD-RW drive and hard drive (IDE)

When I try to load Ubuntu, it says "Loading Kernel" and then freezes and doesn't do shit. When I try to load Gentoo it shows a few colored lines at the very top pixel of the screen, and doesn't do shit. I'm sick and tired of this not working, especially when Windows boots no problem (with both motherboards). The problem is I need and want Linux on this box, and Linux absolutely refuses to work.

I would really appreciate some help, as I have so far wasted $400 and a month on Linux and it still won't install.

test your memory, throw that ubuntu cd back in and boot from it, then choose the memtest option at the bottom of the menu. otherwise I'd say it's probably your video card. and which install option did you choose for ubuntu? try the text mode. maybe your cd drive is hosed, try a floppy based distro.
oh and if the memtest freezes then it's probably your video card. (or bad CPU, ACK! but the bios will usually pipe up about that)

Alright I'll give that a try thanks. I actually ran memtest before (with the old mobo) and it seemed to work fine. For installing Ubuntu I used just the default mode (GUI). BIOS say that everything works fine, but I guess I'll try using the onboard video and see what happens. I can also try swapping in some different memory, but I'm pretty sure that the mem is ok.

Thanks for the advice

EDIT: Yeah... I didn't really expect it to work at all, but I got farther than I have yet. Now instead of freezing at a pointless splash screen, I got it to have a little bar which scrolls back and forth beneath "UBUNTU" on the screen as it tries and fails to load the kernel at least it's trying now even if it can't do anything. I added a couple options to the boot command to do this (I forget sorry) that disabled some touchy errors. My onboard video won't even output anything to the monitor, possibly because I have the PCI-X in? It's past 1 am so I'm not taking the computer apart right now.

Is this new hardware, or did it work at some time w/ something else?

What, if anything, has changed?

Are any of the CD's you tried the "live" kind that you could test (i.e. just boot) in another box?