Hello all, and thanks for reading....

First off, I have tried burning every ISO out there, including the latest versions of Ubuntu, Fedora, Knoppix, etc, etc.
I have used several different CD/DVD burning programs, like Nero, Alcohol, InfraRecorder, BurnCCCD, etc, etc.
I have burned using different speeds, DAO, SAO, blah, blah.......ugh

Well, just spent 16 freakin bucks on a Linux mag...has Ubuntu and other programs on DVD...ok....does it work? NOPE!

It always hangs after it looks like its loading....about 3 1/2 of those little yello bar segments. Everytime......and no other distro I burned work either...they always error or freeze.

ANY help would be greatly appreciated, as I am very interested in learning Linux.

My PC....

HP Pavilion a1110n
512M
Geforce4 MX4000 with 128M and the latest nVidia drivers available....have the on board video disabled.

Thanks everyone!

Brian.

http://www.futurehardware.in/561707.htm

Looks like your machine has a special bios that locks you out of installing any other OS...

If you still want to learn linux, you could download the free VMware server and then install linux inside a virtual machine.

At what point does it fail. Are there any error messages? Also do you even get to the book menu?

I told the BIOS to boot from the CD Drive first.....I think I read some HP's have the BIOS on the hardrive? What kind of crap is that!?!?

I do not get an error message, just see the bar moving back and forth in Ubuntu as it is starting to load, then the progress bar comes up and starts a little bit, then freezes.

This is pretty much how it happens in every distro I have tried.

I did get an old version of Knoppix 4.0.2 I believe to work....it was from the older book Linux for Dummies....but it's an older and basic version of Linux. Would love to use a newer, and of course, fancier version with all the bells and whistles that have come around.

Any suggestions, such as typing a command somehow/somewhere? In any version or distro??? I have them all burned on CD...well, except the ones I threw in the trash getting pissy and all!

Thanks,
Brian.

Look at the link I posted above. It appears your particular model has a BIOS/harddrive communication encrypted which prevents you from doing anything, even booting a non-installed OS.

Sorry, but if that link is accurate, your best bet is a virtual machine...

Wow, I read that about the Pheonix bios......that's really ridiculous......should have known.
This is why I want to build my own computer from scratch and then stick nothing but Linux on it! Well...maybe have it be dual bootable for the Windows games that I do like to play!

Any helpful hints about hardware, video, memory, etc.
I have seen many videos on You Tube of users having these beautiful desktops with all kinds of effect (Beryl, Comp something or other, XGL, etc, etc)

Another quick question....I am on the VMware site right now....if I get this program......it won't upset anything on my harddrive will it? I have way too much stuff on there to lose everything, even though I have backed it up...just a pain in the butt to lose it all....AND to feel the wrath of the wife! She hates whenever I mess around!

Before you totally give up, I'd see if there's a bios update that maybe removes that crap. I'm guessing not, but if they got enough complaints it's possible.

As to building your own machine, I would recommend checking anything you buy against the HCL at the top of the page. Also, if you go to Newegg.com, look at all reviews for each component (hint: search for "linux" so you don't have to read through all the posts).

When I built my box 18 months ago, the video card landscape was that Nvidia was better supported, so I went with it. ATI opened up part of their specs to help open source development, so they might catch up in the next 6-12 months and have some better support.

The only other thing I found is that IDE channels are going out of style. So if you have some old IDE drives you want to use, make sure you get enough channels. My board only has one IDE channel (master + slave) so my old HD rides as master and my DVD-RW rides as slave. A problem arose when I wanted to recover data from my buddies IDE drive, so I bought an IDE to USB converter and that worked okay. But keep that stuff in mind when you get your motherboard.

Beyond that, building a machine was fun and not as challenging as I expected it to be. I got 2GB of RAM but I don't think I've ever used more than 1GB even with a bunch of stuff running at once (though I don't do heavy video editing, which I guess is pretty taxing).

VMware server is just an application that runs on top of windows. It installs just like Office or anything else. Then you install linux into an image file that pretends to be a hard drive. Just remember that if you install a full linux install, that image will be like 5-10GB, so make sure you have the space (if you want a smaller linux, you could go with something like Xubuntu or Puppy). If you don't like it, just delete the image and uninstall VMware...

Oh, and it's possible that your 512MB ram may significantly slow stuff down, because you have to dedicate some amount of RAM to your virtual machine. And the VM will run a bit slow. So I would check and see how much RAM you're burning right now with whatever things are running in your task bar.

If you need to wipe some stuff out (like Adobe update checker, quicktime update checker, etc, etc) try googling for StartupCPL. It makes it a snap to disable all that crap.

I'd like to thank you for all your help.
I am downloading the Vmware player, and I am on a site that lets you download appliances free of charge such as linux distros.
At least this way, I can mess around a bit with Linux, until I build myself another PC.

Thanks again,
Brian.