I bought a new tower PC (Dell Dimension 5000, with Intel P4 530HT) mostly to take the strain off when doing distchecks. Installing Linux was a bit of a struggle.

I wanted to keep the pre-installed NTFS Windows XP partition, but I did not find any LiveCD that was capable of resizing it. Most did not even recognise the (SATA) drive. The stable Ubuntu LiveCD would not even boot, though the “milestone” unstable Ubuntu LiveCD did. Knoppix 3.7 booted in default mode, but not when using the linux26 option. I gave up and used Partition Magic.

The Debian Sarge preview release was doing well, but then failed to boot after installation. For some reason it installed a k7-smp kernel, which I think is for a multi-processor AMD system, instead of a non-smp Intel x86 one. Stable Ubuntu did better, but hung while synchronizing the system clock. After googling, I reinstalled with the acpi=off option, which fixed everything. I wanted Debian on at least one PC, but Ubuntu won again.