My new computer is being a pain.

The first cd ever in it was my Ubuntu edgy live cd. It booted up and installed fine. I can't get ANY other live cds to work. I've tried DSL(i forget which version), Puppy seamonkey, luit, and GoblinX. I figured since they weren't that popular, it wasn't that bad for it not to support my hardware.

I just got the gentoo live dvd, though, and it didn't boot either. I figured it should be able to.

DSL, Puppy, and Luit crash to a text shell when I try to boot them. It says it can't find something about Knoppix. Goblin X freezes in the boot screen. Gentoo freezes when it's trying to mount CD to sda (at least I think it freezes. I let it go about 10 minutes). Ubuntu was the only one that "just worked." I don't know much at all about linux, so I didn't mess with any boot options (just ones to make it load directly into RAM. I tried them without that, too)

I hope windows vista works. I'm probably getting the OEM, and you can't return those...

In Soviet Russia, Linux Doesn't Like You!

oh well, windows vista is ++, very stable =)

/me coughs loudly

Yeah, and it also beats Linux in terms of its vastly superior security.

/me can no longer contain his coughing spasm

The contrast is that I think Pseudoprogrammer was actually serious.

</sarcasm>

Did you try turning off ACPI? That makes some comps (like mine) act weird at start up for some reason...

But anyway, as for the Linux vs Windows thing, I don't think I will ever really like Windows - especially not Vista nor anything lower than XP. Vista looks cool, but so many people have tried Vista at my school and complained about it only a day or two later that it's not letting them do something, or it's done "something bad."

I like Linux because:
- I can customize the hell out of it.
- I can rebuild the system and programs so they run faster.
- The Windows Registry gets dirty over time. Even when I use cleaning utilities, it doesn't clean up EVERYTHING. And when I try to back to registry up and restore it on another comp, I'm practically asking for stability problems. In Linux, since all the setting are kept in either /etc or in my home directory, all I gotta do is just copy them somewhere, and if I ever need to reinstall anything or decide to change Linux distributions, I won't lose any settings.
- I was going for a fourth reason, but I've edited this post way too many times

yeah, I don't know what your issue is really, but Ubuntu is a fine distro to stick with, I would just stick with it if I were you.

Holly crap, I seriously fell out of my chair laughing when I read that. I helped a friend build a new computer and put Vista on it, and get this, it BSODed a total of 8 times during THE INSTALL ALONE. I had to restart the computer and reformat the drives more times than I cared to count. It would also just randomly stop reading the CD for NO REASON AT ALL. But once it was installed it was rock solid... well, except for the BSOD that occurs whenever you try to shut it down....

@Foamy: Try going into the BIOS and doing a "Load defaults" (if it has one for compatibility/safe/etc or optimized, load the compatibility defaults). Then go through and double check the settings to make sure it looks sane (such as USB mouse/keyboard support being on if you have a USB keyboard or mouse, and that Plug and Play aware OS is turned off - that goes for if you are using windows as well). Also, I'm sure the error can be fixed if you can actually give some information. For example, when you start up the Gentoo DVD, do you get to the live CD desktop? If not, are you dumped to a terminal? Is there an error, and if so, what is it?

apparently you missed my </sarcasm> tag later, i crashed my friends vista 3 times in less then an hour -_-

Foamy, your problem is with the chipset your mobo uses. I have the same board (Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3), and the PATA chipset is a JMB397 (or something). There's a bug in the vanilla kernel which forces that controller into some mode which disables the PATA, so no CD can be found, so install fails. Ubuntu's distro-specific patches fix that bug, and in kernels 2.6.19 and up, it's also been fixed. (My gentoo-sources 2.6.19-r6 kernel works, at any rate)
Vista should work fine, and I've seldom had it crash. When it has, hdaudio.sys (only happened with Beta 2) and my display drivers were always at fault, not the system itself.