Very odd, your PC appears to have travelled back in time. I just plugged that error into Google and all the responses are coming back from around 2001 and discussing Dos errors! Do you have a Dos partition (possibly a recovery partition) on the PC?

Clueless,

From what I have been able to learn, "CANNOT CONTROL ADDRESS LINE A20" refers to high memory access and the only thing I could find related to Linux had to do with the 2.4 kernel. I don't know, but certainly if the software is having difficulty with memory in your machine, it certainly could be a problem.

I am not a programmer and that is a programmer level problem. Over my head, but hopefully a programmer will see the post and address it for you.

All the best with it

Bob

Nope! It's all clean ext.3 now.

But I know the feeling of going backwards in (useful) time - since I bought my first computer I think it was.

Okay, thanks, Bob. THe message doesn't refer to any specific device, which isn't very helpful to say the least.

Update: have tried cleaning install DVD and drive but installation still freezes at exact same point - "installing Arabic language pack..." which doesn't seem like the most likely point for an install to fail to my way of thinking. Yet there we have it!

However, installation DVD was burned by a third party (internet cafe job) and I have no knowledge of their burner, their experience, and the media they use, so it could be a problem with the install disk for any number of reasons. But having said that, as I've said earlier, the checksum test comes out clean.

Keep thinking, guys!

CC.

I do believe the A20 error had to do with a keyboard error in the days of Dos.
From what I have read it seems that you need a new DVD or a Live cd and that would probably take care of your problem.

Do you really want the international language support packages? They comprise a boatload of packages and I have always left them out of my install. Try without those packages and see what happens.

Bob

As Homer Simpson once said: "D'oh!" Why didn't I think of that myself??
Thanks, Bob. I'll report back in due course. Great idea!

CC.

Well it WAS a great idea, but the computer thought differently. On selecting "custom installation" I got a "unhandled exception error" stating the problem was probably a bug that should be reported to such and such a web address. So I regret to say still no joy at this end. Perhaps this piece of hardware is just jinxed. :-(

Anyone got any other suggestions as to how I can install Fedora 8 or something comparable on this infernal laptop?

Have you tried any of the install options? Things like nopaic nolapic acpi=off? Those are frequently crucial in getting any distro to install on a laptop. Fedora has an F key (F6 I believe) to set such options.

Another good suggestion! Yes, I will try it. Additionally, there is a 'text-based install' option (whatever that is) and I'm wondering if that might be of any use too?

CC.

It might be. I have some experience with the text installer working while the GUI version did not but that was Debian, not Fedora. However, the text version is there mainly as an alternative for people who do not have RAM enough to run the GUI installer.

Finally installed!!

I'm finally flying with Fedora! After the umpteenth re-try, it's all gone in and appears to be working fine. Obviously there'll need to be a few tweaks, but the main thing is it's now up and running, thank God. I believe it was a bug in the early part of the set-up but won't elaborate unless anyone's desperate to know as I can't wait to put the installation experience behind me, to be quite honest.

Initial impressions: what a lot of applications and accessories! I'd expected a simple OS with maybe Open Office and a handful of tools, but this is pretty impressively stacked-out with LOADS of useful stuff. A lot of hard work by a lot of good people, clearly.

Thanks to all who helped me work through this problem. I'll be posting again for further advice on tweaking and whatnot.

Thanks again,

CC.

Congrats Completely Clueless. You will find that even the smallest install comes packed with loads of software, far more than on a proprietary OS :)