3 Days Wasted Trying To Make Linux Work. 1037

There will always be wierd hardware combinations that are going to be the exception to the rule and cause some catastrophic install failures. They are usually documented somewhere, but by the time you think to look for them, you've already burned way to much time.

I had a very similar experience with Windows XP on a particular clutch of machines. I had bought CPUs that were almost, but not quite, the ones I needed. It was compatible enough to boot, and get the install running, machine would stay up for a few minutes, and then punch out. Very frustrating. Slackware did run on them, but I needed XP on those machines. Turned out that I needed to flash a bios update to make that particular motherboard + CPU compatible with XP. Almost made me wish for the days when the 12mhz 286 ruled the world, and memory chips still came as chips...

Just be happy you only burned three days, add a few extra bullhead genes in the mix and you could've wasted real time hunting down some of the wierdness that can go on in modern machines.

In general though, for typical everyday people with typical every day machines, linux is no more difficult to install than XP.