Hello everyone - this is my first post, and it's going to be a long one...
Yesterday, having finally had enough of windows crashes and general crapness, I decided to put a copy of Mandrake 9 on my system.
Unfortunately I am a poor student, and couldn't afford to buy an official box, so I bought a DVD magazine with 3 Mandrake CD images on it.
I promptly burnt those onto CD, and rebooted.
When I got to the installation splashscreen, I hit enter for standard installation (I've used Unix, and a few flavours of linux before, but I'd still consider myself a newbie).... something happened, only I wasn't able to see it, because for whatever reason, it didn't show up on my monitor.
Next port of call was to try the bootable CD on another PC I have knocking around ( an old cyrix 300Mhz I keep (for some reason)...I know, I know....
cyrix??)
Anyway, this booted fine, went straight into the installation process without battering an eyelid. ****.
Now, I'm very proud of my 'new' PC (okay, it's nearly a year old now...

), which I built myself, and has the following spec:
2x Athlon XP1800+ processors
Asus A7M266-D Motherboard
512MB DDR (PC 2100) RAM
GeForce 4 Ti4600 (PNY Verto) graphics card.
I am not very happy that I can't run linux on my decent machine, especially since it runs elsewhere fine. This leads me to believe that possibly there is a problem with my hardware setup, but really I have no idea at all - like I said, I'm really just a newbie to this.
Finally, I tried running the installation process in text mode - however, it got as far as the line "..TIMER: vector=0x31 pin 1=2 pin 2=0" (does that mean anything to anyone?) and then it stopped altogether.
If anyone could offer me any advice I'd much appreciate it. I need Linux!
Thanks,
Martin