Just a couple of lines for the noob's that are stressing out . I ad an old Athlon 600 machine lying around that I reckoned would be good for a learn on Linux. I had installed Mandriva LE 2005 (finally after downloading & burning a working set of disks) and for kicks decided to have a look at Ubuntu 5.10 before I made my mind on anything . Both were running fine individually but Ubuntu seemed to really drag after a while .

Anyway, after some minimal surfing, I figured it was something with the install or some similar software issue so I thought I'd put Mandriva back on. No matter what I kept having an issue with the partitioner locking and would go any further with the install . Both instances of distro would do the same thing and then lock up after the partitioning of the /root partition.

I was at wits end, looking at all the threads and starting to think I'd fried 2 hd's. As a last resort I swapped the memory sticks I had from 3 slots (2x 128 & 256) to just a simple stick at a time. Flucked it first time and it turns out the the 256mb stick was causing some conflict with the linux install. BIOS didn't pick, prior version of XP didn't either.

MORAL of the story: It may not be the software........

Bob T

Congrats on the diagnostics. Faulty RAM stinks, I have nearly threw out a perfectly good mainboard in the past until I realized it didn't start giving me problems until after a memory upgrade. Some things are just easily overlooked.

I liked Ubuntu for its easy installation and nice hardware detection but I tend to like KDE better than Gnome so I went with Kubuntu. My gripe with Kubuntu is how it seemed to give you a "clean" KDE with its own version of control-center type tools. It almost felt limiting. I understand how it is meant to be an unimtimidating distro, but it almost felt "crippled". If you really like learning, give slackware a try. The partitioning during setup can seem scary depending on whether you use fdisk or cfdisk (cfdisk is a bit more "user-friendly"), just dont forget to write your changes to disk (It took me 20 mins trying to figure out why the partition table wasn't being saved.)

You are doing the right thing, you're trying different distros in search of the "perfect one" for yourself and aren't just blaming linux for every little hiccup. Keep in mind that learning linux should be enjoyable, not a pain.

Hi and welcome to LQ.

It sounds like you made a good start using Linux. Early troubleshooting is good

Mandriva/drake is definately a good choice for a start, or as your main os for that instance.

Enjoy and have fun