I have a relatively new Acer AMD-64 laptop. I want to give Linux a whirl so I grabbed Red Hat Enterprise/x86 AS 3 and Mandrake 10.1 to compare. I could not install either one.

When I boot the red hat CD, it prompts how I want to install (graphical/textual) and in either choice loads some things and before long goes to a black screen indefinitely (left it overnight).

When I insert the Mandrake Linux DVD and get much further. It repartitions the disk drive, asks what packages I want and I take all defaults. It gives me constant error boxes telling me it can't install each and every packages.

The discs seem good as it doesn't ever seem to struggle reading them. Any suggestions?

Hi,

I suggest you to download a LiveCD or an install CD of Ubuntu (Dapper Drake).

For computers based on the AMD64 or EM64T architecture (e.g., Athlon64, Opteron, EM64T Xeon). It is not necessary for all (even most) processors made by AMD -- only their 64 bit chips.

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/cdimage/releases/dapper/flight-3/ -> Gnome desktop

http://cdimage.ubuntulinux.org/kubuntu/rel...apper/flight-3/ -> KDE desktop

With a LiveCD it's easy to control if your computer is able too boot with a Linux distro.