I bought a laptop with XP on it, but it would only boot to the splash screen then just sit there. I started installing Redhat, and it went like a dream until I clicked the next button to begin installing packages, at which point it immediately shut the computer off! When I tried to power up again, it refused to stay on unless the Linux CD was absent from the drive, and then even the XP splash screen was gone. Now it just says something about a windows kernel error and missing .dll's. I don't even want that d%#n Windows OS there at all! What is the deal? By the way, it is a Sony Vaio laptop. Any help would be appreciated

Well, aside from checking the model on something like www.linux-laptop.net, the best thing I can recommend is to try another distrobution. Yeah, its the shotgun debugging approach, but it tends to work after a few tries. Unless you can find a model specific reason as to why it won't boot right with a specific release of a specific distro, its really a lot of guesswork. There's just too much proprietary hardware in laptops to make everything a dead-on certain install, especially Vaio's as Sony does weird things to them to get them that small.

Cheers,

Finegan