Quote:i tried fedora 9. it hangs the system when trin to load from cd. The GUI is not loading.
Compaq are under ownership of HP, aren't they?
If that's the case, there's a bug in the way the ACPI is handled under Fedora - something to do with the newer architecture of the motherboard. I had this issue when installing Fed7 on an HP cd5700 - you need something like "pci=nommconf" during the install, and to the boot parameters once installed. Take a look here:
http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers...x/k8-notes.html
Secondly, you may want to try installing Linux in non-graphical mode first. I know text-only looks ugly, but at least you can get it up and running first, then add on the GUI later on.
Lastly, there was a bug with the network card driver - if you are stuck on getting your NIC to work, note that the Broadcom uses the "tg3" module (driver). I had to manually compile a new module before there was an update out, but I heard it may affect later Fedora versions also.
The other option is to try a ubuntu CD, as anyweb suggests - people have reported a much greater level of success with this distro than others, IME.