That can happen with any distro install, on random hardware, from what I've seen. Which is why one needs one or two other easily-installed distros up one's sleeve, at all times. Not getting hung up on any particular brand seems the best advice to me.
True - but it irks me when all the so called 'latest' versions vary so widely with their hardware detection. Ubuntu failed on my fairly new system but was OK on an older Geode based SBC. From all the distro's Ive tried installing over the past 2~3 years, I'd rank Knoppix as having pretty good hardware detection and MDK as being the dest for sorting out partition problems..
Just out of interest, how simply does Knoppix or Morphix get installed to hdd? Answer as for a newbie please. ($#, mount, cd \ etc.)
Install was quite easy (for a Linux distro) - insert CD, reboot, wait for desktop to appear then press CTRL + ALT + F1 - type knx2hd and press enter. Install script starts up - menu driven - select your options and go. I can't recall all the options or exact steps I took - it was intuitive and I managed to fumble my way through it OK - would think someone with a base knowledge of Windows would be OK. Apart from the initial knx2hd bit, everything was menu driven - no stupid console mount stuff. Once install finished, I typed reboot - all services shut down, CD ejected and system rebooted when I pressed a key as asked. Upon reboot, Lilo asked which OS (install had found the windoze partitions) - selected Linux and within a short time kdm appeared. Logged on under the user name and password I had entered in the install setup procedure and was presented with the KDE desktop setup - set regional setting, turned sound effects on and wamo Linux was up and running.
Another thing surprised me - its a debian system so I updated the sources list to jetstream games, did an update then upgrade and was really surprised to see I needed to pull down a handful of new packages. But a word of warning for those doing this - 'frozen-bubble-data' package has something wrong with its install script and will break things if you try to uninstall it. To fix it took a few hours of figuring where all of it was, deleting it then manually updating files - a real pain. But all's OK now and you'll probably only have this problem if your like me and want to strip out all games, locales and other stuff to get a small install - without doing this your looking at about a 1.8 gigs HD install.
