I have a spare computer which I decided to switch from XP to linux on. I downloaded Ubuntu 5.10, burnt to a CD and tried to install. IT gets 86% done copying over the packages and freezes for a good 20 minutes. It then tells me that the copying of packages failed, then lets me continue. After it restarts, it wil not get past the "Preparing to install packages" phase. I tried to burn another disk, as I thought maybe that was the problem. It won't boot from that disk. I tried downloaded the ISO and burning it again, still won't boot from the disk. I download Kubuntu and burnt it, still, no booting from disk. It will only read the first disk I burnt, and always hangs up in the same spot. Is there something I may be doing wrong? I'm pretty sure I've followed the instructions pretty well, but I just can't get this to work. Thanks -Ryan

Brave man, wiping out XP and going straight for a Linux install! How big is your hard drive? Do you meet the hardware requirements? If there is too much to load you tend not to get a message telling you that - only messages that certain packages can't be loaded. (I like "Zenwalk Linux" which is only 420Mb on the disk, but it needs 2Gb of hard disk.) You might have been better to try a "Live CD" first. This is a CD which runs entirely from RAM memory and doesn't need to be installed to the hard drive. This would tell you that a particular distro will run on your system without problems.

Well, I have a 40 gig hard drive. Should I maybe mess with the partition sizes? I've just been using the default.

Well your hard disk certainly is large enough. It does look like a partitioning problem. Could it be trying to sqeeze eveything into a small space and leaving the rest untouched? This is going to sound crazy but I try to stay away from Fdisk etc. I tend to use a Mandrake/Mandriva disk. I start it up run to the point of grapically representing the hard drive with partitions, let it format and then switch off the machine. I can then load my prefered distro on the Mandriva partitions. 97 times out of 100 it works. It is possible to download e.g.a Kubuntu Live CD rather then a Kubuntu Install - the KInfoCentre>Partitions should be able to tell you how things are partitioned

How are you burning the ISOs? Doesn't sound like you are burning them as images if the CDs wont boot. Did you check the MD5 sum of the ISO you downloaded to see if it became corrupted?