Problems installing Linux

[iowavw]

Hello, I am kind of new to Linux OSs but have have seen enough to know I want to run linux. Now the problem. I built a computer.
Asus M3N78-EM
AMD Athalon 64 x2 Kuna 3.7Ghz processor
WD 250GB HD
WD 200GB HD
2GB Kingston DDR2 1066 dual channel ram
wireless Mi keyboard and mouse

This MB is fairly new to the market. Has HDMI, DVI. Nvidia 8300, 7.1 realtek audio and optical. It is a pretty nice board. I am using it for an Home entertainment computer and hooking it up to my surround sound and LCD toshiba tv with the HDMI.

The drives were empty. I put in Freespire and tried the live cd but it said I/O errors. So I went and tried Ubuntu 8.10 and it just freezes trying to load. So I thought maybe a different distro being those are debian based and when with Sabayon and this worked great in the live run. It is very similar (looks) to Freespire and I installed. Install went fine. then I did the restart and pulled the disk and it started to load. Went to enter user name and password and it started but then said something like error check you installation. restart with the disk and it works fine on live cd. I dont know what the problem was. I tried to reinstall but no good then tried the install that fixes errors and stuff, it took 3 hours and still didnt work.

So I dowloaded Poseiden, ubuntu based. It worked with the live and installed but also didnt work right.

Tried many distros, cant remeber them all, Slackware, Fedora, etc...

I really want Freespire or Sabayon to work but lost with what to do to make them work. Can anyone point me in the right direction to fix the issues or am I just stuck with using Windows? I am just sick of them.

thanks, joel

[circa82]

I would start from scratch. Check the md5 sum of either the Freespire or Sabayon iso, then burn at a low speed (4x). What program are you using to burn with, also?

Point being, make sure it's not actual CD problem, then go from there.

[jmadero]

with that setup I'd suggest mythbuntu (Ubuntu with MythTV frontend). You could have a great entertainment setup with it. You also might want to check out Linux MCE