I recently got a new Compaq laptop, I fought with it for days trying to install redhat, finaly gave up and tryed mandrake both totaly locked up after incorectly installing a driver for the firewire port(1394) which I did not want anyway, but there was no way to turn it off, I got ticked and sent the thing back and got a new HP laptop, more $$ more features, but Unfortunatly I couldnt get a amd cpu with out waiting another month by special order so I have to put up with the intel (p4) at anyrate it does excatly the same thing and redhat or mandrake refuses to install I sent e-mail till I was blue in the face, Called redhat, all they would say was send us big bucks and we will give you tech support no they would not garenty they could/would fix it... they was rude and totaly worthless on the phone. D/loaded suse... Guess what installed flawlessly, works perfectly, FREE ONLINE UPGRADES. can do rpms , the installer program ( Yast2 ) is wonderfull. I'll leave Cobra alone but all the rest of my systems are going to SUSE.
This sounds very similar to my experience trying to install my first version of Linux on my PC with its odd hardware. Nothing worked until I tried SuSE 7.3. I'm slowly starting to use Debian and Slackware more, but I'll always have a soft spot for SuSE because it just friggin works. (value added to thread: 0.1) Josh