I don't understand why i can slap mandrake 10 on a bodgy old celeron 433 on a yumcha generic board with, unknown 4mb onboard video, a random network card and 64mb of ram, the install works, and i can use linux to my hearts content. Everything works out of the box, all the options in setup work etc etc etc.

Come to my main PC, I have a second 10GB primary master hard disk. A nforce2 chipset board, a 2.5ghz (yes ghz) athlon cpu, 1gb of ram and a gf3ti video card.
I cannot get linux to work out of the box. Setup runs wonderfully, i get a nice graphical screen with a working mouse. I run all the tests, setup network / video etc.

After install the mouse doesnt work (doesnt light up) and i get a garbled screen. Sure i can use text mode, and in xconfig setup different res but nothing works. This is so very lame. Esp since this is the powerpack dvd version, which browsing the dvd shows drivers for the nforce2 chipset and nvidia cards ... i mean really in this day and age charging for this is a joke when i can red hat 6 or whatever and slap it on an old box just the same and have it work.

I knew i was expecting to much to get it to work with my sil image raids and sata drives but an old 10GB hdd on primary master ... i figured what could possibly go wrong i mean surely i should get a graphical user interface .. setup has one that works fine.

WHY/HOW can setup identify and test correctly the video card and the mouse and graphics work (albeit 2d) and yet upon first bootup it dies in the ass?

I have heard / searched for the nvidia issue and installing the drivers .... i have the .run package installed .. .no go.

my rant about mandrake read it or not .. just venting.

I believe that during install you have to at the summery screen you have to select boot and turn on the the no local acpi for that mother board. Since it's loaded go into the MCC in the boot section select boot loader and enable the Force No Local APIC & No APIC. this is what I had to do to get mine to work properly. Until then it would freeze at boot up.

Something is just screwy with ACPI and APIC...my laptop doesn't like either one...that could very well be the problem though