Hello all.

After a few very friendly replies to my initial query named "Which distro should I get?", I just learned that the topic has been locked due to very acceptable resaon; namely, "everyone does have a different ice cream preference."

I apologize for not having realized that earlier.

However, I feel that my distro question was only part and parcel to my entire problem and that is why I am rephrasing my original query so here goes:

I have an Acer Aspire 5052 laptop with the following specs:
AMD Turion 64 2.2 GHz
2Gb RAM
ATI Radeon Xpress 1100 GPU (sharing 256Mb from main RAM)
80Gb HD with Intel 82810 Ultra ATA controller

I am trying to run:
Fedora 8 KDE LiveCD x86_64
Fedora 8 Desktop LiveCD x86_64
Fedora 8 KDE LiveCD i686
Fedora 8 Desktop LiveCD i686
Linpus Linux LiveCD
I wanted to try all so that I may be able to choose which distro's full version I will eventually download and install.

None of the Fedoras work on my laptop. It will boot, show the "Will automatically boot in x seconds..." screen, than go to the boot options screen. After choosing boot option, it will continue to uncompress linux and will either continuously and unendingly scroll command line text or completely stop with the message "Kernel Panic - not syncing - attempting to kill init!" In both cases, the laptop is completely frozen and will not even restart with Ctrl-Alt-Delete keys.
On the other hand, the Linpus LiveCD will freeze on the loading/progress bar screen where no progress is actually displayed. Restarting with the key comvination at this point is also impossible.

I have downloaded and burned all distros at least twice but still have the same prob. The Linpus Distro on the other hand will still not boot on the laptop but will be able to boot my P4 desktop machine (my first 2 Linpus copies were able to do that too).

Any suggestions and solutions will be greatly appreciated.

I have yet to try an earlier suggestion to boot Ubuntu in a non-graphical way since it may be my graphic card causing the problem. As I am only about to download an Ubuntu version, will installing the Fedora distro I have in text-mode solve the issue? How do I do that with a liveCD iso?

Thanks and I am looking forward to any advise.