Hi All! I'm a complete Linux n00b, and apologize beforehand.

Now, for some reason my brand-new Compaq Presario f730 Laptop will not boot any Linux distribution I have tried, which includes Ubuntu 7.10 and the latest Pendrive Linux. The Live CD will function on my older Dell, I have not yet tried the Pendrive.

What happens is that the CD goes through the booting process, but reports an error as it loads the GNOME display manager. The boot continues, though, and where there should be the splash screen and opening sound, I get a truly disconcerting error, in which a kaleidoscope of odd colors/lines/dots show up on the screen and it slowly fades to black. It looks REALLY strange, like all the liquid crystal is visible. First time I tried it, I thought it was a) some calibration thing or b) that my monitor was now totally destroyed. Luckily, it didn't hurt anything.

It does the same thing when I try safe-graphics mode.

Specs:
AMD Athalon 64 dual-core 1.8 Ghz
2 GB Ram
120 GB HD
Nvidia GeForce go 6150

Any suggestions?

Thanks!!
Nick

Ubuntu 7.10 is a lost cause on the Compaq F730. I managed to get Fedora 8 to boot and install using the Live Cd. No luck getting the Broadcom WIFI to work (yet).

Boot with "noapic irqpoll acpi=off" which you can also edit into menu.lst



Thereafter (if there are internet connection, which may overwrite the menu.lst if there's any kernel update, then you just add the same thing to grub again):


Which wifi card do you have?

True enough, quite a few Ubuntu 7.10 users are "a lost cause"...
But the distro itself - hardly so.