I have a dell deimenson 4800i desktop.
2.8 single core p4
1.2 gb of fram
500 gig sata drive
I have went throught 5 live cds of diffrent linux's.

Everyone has either froze in the menu, or displayed errors.

What can I do? The hard drive is fine. I installed ubuntu on it, in a diffrent machine, it wouldnt boot in this computer, so thats where I tried installing 5 diffrent live cd's.

what can i do?

What distros did you try? What were the error messages (specific to each OS)? From the information given (or rather, the lack thereof), the only suggestion that makes sense to me is try another distro. I realize this isn't very helpful, but more information is needed to give a better response.

Ubuntu 9.10
Open Suse (latest)
Fedora (latest)
Mandriva (latest)

Hi,

Welcome to LQ!

The CD/DVD images were valid? You did check the md5sum?

What about the CD/DVD image, verified a valid burn?

The 'md5sum' or 'hash' is very important to learn to use and too regularly get in the habit of utilizing it. You can get a sum checker for M$ if need be; 'md5sum.exe'.

For GNU/Linux the 'man md5sum' will get you all the information to perform the check. You can get the 'man command' from the 'cli' at anytime.

If you downloaded the CD/DVD ISO then be sure to check the md5sum for the original ISO. From the cli;

If the ISO md5 is OK then you should check the image burn with 'CdromMd5sumsAfterBurning''.

This way you will know if the burn was OK!

This will check the download ISO with the known md5sum that you also get with the ISO. You should do the check for any download that you might perform, even a LiveCD. Plus burn the image. Sometimes you may need to lower the burn rate to get a valid burn.


The above links and others can be found at 'Slackware-Links'. More than just Slackware® links!

Seems like the most stable one is Mandriva
I put the Livecd in. and it boots to a screen where it has the Mandriva Background, with a swirlling animation. After about 10 minutes, it goes to a screen that says
[localhost login]
I type in localhost. and then it says
[password:]

Okay, I dont know a password. The bios and the computer has no password on it, So
I dont know what the deal is.

breaking news

I got the fedora live cd to boot to a desktop, after waiting about 25 minutes.

What is better, mandriva or fedora?

SOLVED!!!

Come to find out it was my cd drive. It was only reading bits and peices of the live cd. I swapped out my cd drive. now everything works

We like happy endings!!---I'm marking this thread as solved.