First off my machine---->
AMD k7 500
~384 MB or RAM sitting on an old ASUS K7V i think
Nvidia TNT2
SB Live!
and booting from a HP IDE burner

(Not much of a screamer but still it's a computer for a poor college student)

My problem is that my machine doesn't want to boot off the CDs. My Bios is set the boot off the cd and i actually have Win2k running on it now. I find it old how m$ products seem to work ok on dying hardware, it'll boot and work for a given amount of time but ends up just BSODing....and linux needs fully working good hardware....Anyway, it seems to error (hang hardcore i mean) during the autoprobing for the hardware looking at:

...
ttyS0 at 0x03f8 (irg = 4 ) is a 16550A
ttyS1 at 0x02f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A
...

I'm guessing it's my COM1 and COM2 porting messing up, and maybe bad ram cuz of the hex numbers. but the weird part is that i was able to install gentoo fine on it. Granted i had an error "emerge(ing) xfree" but still i was able to autoprobe fine. Any suggestions? I guess more along the lines is there a way to boot not looking at the com ports, other then turning them off in the BIOS?

Your motherboard may have something enabled on it that it does not like, possible a PCI card ( i think your Video card is Okay) ... you really ought to try out Fedora stuff (its free too)

this is a different question... I'm running rh8 on an AMD k6 266 megs. w/30 gig hd
160 megs ram, Nvida sound card, soundblaster sound... and I'm trying to install
xine to play media. I've downloaded it, and ran the string
"$rpm -ivh xine-lib-0.9.6-0.src rpm-ui-0.9.6-0src.rpm at root and got the message
"bash: -ivh: command not found"
what is up with that?

well the first thing i'd do is get apt-get. it's at http://apt.freshrpms.net and learn to use it. Then all you have to do is --->

bash# apt-get update
bash# apt-get install xine

And it should work fine.

apt-get rules! you have no idea what your missing out.