Bought a copy of Linux Magazine a few months ago which contained a copy of Suse10 . I had been interested in Linux for some time so decided to give it a try. I installed the product on a Dell 4550 without incident all all seems to be ok.

Over the next couple of months I received Centos Linux and Mandriva one included in the same magazine. Decided to load Mandriva on my main PC which is aan HP a819n. This is a 2.8 gig machine with 1 gig of memory and 130 Gigs of Hard Drive space available.

When tried to boot from the DVD all I got was the initial screen asking me to push enter if I wanted to install. Then the Blue bird came up and nothing more happened. left the PC for 30 min and still no change. Had to unplug machine to stop it.

Thinking the DVD was bad I tried to install Centos. I got to the point where I was to select which system to install (32 or 64 bit) I selected country and language etc then selected cd drive as the location for the software. The message said it could not find the software and stopped. Again had to turn off the PC.

Finally tried Suse 10 which loaded fine on my Dell 4550. This time I got to a point where there was a long list of things the installation was doing then everything froze up and had to turn off PC.

I am a REAL Newbie and have no idea what to do next. Anyone had this problem with an HP or ideas how to get any one of the 3 versions of Linux running ??