[Sussex] from a green Linux explorer

[Desmond Armstrong]

I am afraid that the problem might be a worn dvd drive.
A new dvd rewriter is as little as £16 in the computer fair. +£6 for a 
USB adaptor so that you can boot from it.
If this is a fairly new machine then the Via chipset may be the problem. 
I have such a machine (an Evesham) and found it impossible to install 
Mandriva 2008.1 PWP (Spring) but I can install Mandriva 2008.0 PWP 
although there are still issues because of the Via P4M900 chipset. At 
the same time the latest fedora or ubuntu will not install at all.
> I have tried to get Mandriva Spring 2008 running on my laptop - 
> without success so far! the progress bar on the first Mandriva screen 
> moves about 20% then stalls
>
> Someone on Mandriva forums suggested I add 'noapic nolapic acpi=off' 
> to the boot options, but that did not work either!!
>
> well, the 'noapic...' did produce more movement, the progress bar 
> moved across but then the screen went blank! one time it actually went 
> back to GRUB, but usually just a black screen, no cursor
>
> another forum contributor suggested the Linux distro could not deal 
> with the computer's video drivers(?)
>
> my Boot Options (apart from adding 'noapic...') are currently;
>
> L 11dd-96ee-7fdfle22462d resume=/dev/sda4 splash=silent vga=788
>
> my computer is Medion - Intel Celeron CPU540 at 1.86GHz 
> <mailto:CPU540 at 1.86GHz> Chrome9 HCIGP Family WDDM
>
> any further thoughts, ideas, suggestions gratefully received...