This is a bit of a long, unrelated post, but I thought it might pique somebody's interest.
My computer at home is crazy, in that it cannot handle many distributions of Linux/BSD/Unix/etc.
When I try to boot a Linux CD, it will halt and give me a kernel panic!
I have been able to pinpoint the cause to the video card/motherboard combination (nVidia FX 5500 PCI card with ASUS P5P800-MX motherboard). When the video card is removed, everybody is happy.
Now here is the interesting part:
I've tried several Linux distributions (Slackware, Mandriva, almost every RH flavour out there, etc) including the Ubuntu family of distros, (both 32 and 64 bit versions), and some other Debian based distros. They all failed miserably. Just to make sure, I've been doing this since I got the system in 2006, with every version of Ubuntu that has come out since then.
I tried some versions of BSD (PC-BSD,OpenBSD,NetBSD,etc) with varying degrees of success.
I tried Solaris, and it works beautifully.
By this point, I'm sure that Debian is not going to work, since Ubuntu hadn't. I popped lenny x64 in my CD Drive and to my surprise, it works! It recognizes the video card, and uses it. I'm getting squeeze now, just to make sure it wasn't a fluke.
So here is my question: does Debian use a special kernel with this bug in mind? Or does it simply use a plain vanilla kernel, that loads a very generic driver, one that every other distro has thrown to the wayside, to favor newer drivers and newer cards? Is Debian's boot process somehow influenced by BSD/Solaris? ( I know that last one might get me in trouble)
By the way, let me repeat that I CAN run Linux without the video card installed, but there's no challenge in that
