I was curious whether anybody here had ever successfully installed Linux on the oem machine in my subject line, and if so, which distro. I have been unable to get it to boot from any live CDs other than older (not recent) versions of Puppy and Slax, although my much less more minimalist Presario S5000NX has never had any probles and actually became my main workhorse running Dam* Small Linux. Of course I'm curious why, and am guessing that it must have something to do with the BIOS. Dim4550: Slackware P4 2.40GhZ, 1GB RAM, 120GB HD PresarioS5000NX: Dam Small Linux, Celeron,384MB RAM,40GB HD DimV400: Kubuntu PII 400Mhz, 256 MB RAM, 8GB HD Gateway P166: W

I have installed RedHat9 on a oem compaq pressario 5838. I have had problems with drivers but It boots just fine. What version of Linux are you useing?

Have you tried passing a combination of kernel boot parameters? Ones that I have found useful for booting problem hardware: nodma noapic nousb nohotplug apm=off nopcmcia mem=64M (eg for a system with 64Mb RAM)

My main workhorse is my Presario S5000NX, which is why I'm so puzzled about the SR1100NX. It seems to be quite nice for what it is and has more features (DVD-ROM/CDRW combo, more USB ports, more RAM, "feels sturdier") than what I'm typing this on. I've seen forum posts by other people who have had trouble getting Linux to boot on this model but no solutions. I haven't tried Red Hat yet because I'm more of a free software/backdoor renegade distro type person, but it's certainly worth a try. I've got XP SP2 on it right now with lots of GNUWin II additions, but since it belongs to my kid I hate having to be the "spyware/virus/trojan police" and limiting his use of the internet. I'm going to copy 3Dave's suggestion of kernal boot parameters to make sure I've tried them all. The Live CDs that haven't worked (so far) are: Dam* Small Linux Knoppix Ubuntu Kubuntu Slax 5.0.5 (current) Puppy 10.1 Austrumi Feather Linux (current and older versions) Vector Linux Simply Mepis Mandrake Move With my other Linux boxes, I found that it was safest to see how they performed with a live CD before doing an HD install. For example, I would have preferred a Debian-based distro for my Dell 4500, but that didn't have the support for my sound card that Slackware gave me. I also couldn't have predicted that the cheaper Dell and the S5000NX would run so nicely and probably wouldn't have bothered with them at all. Anyway, thanks bunches for the replies and I'll definitely remember to come back and share either the solution or the explanation if I ever find either. Dim4550: Slackware P4 2.40GhZ, 1GB RAM, 120GB HD PresarioS5000NX: Dam Small Linux, Celeron,384MB RAM,40GB HD DimV400: Kubuntu PII 400Mhz, 256 MB RAM, 8GB HD Gateway P166: W