Running ASUS P4P800-VM motherboard with Intel 865G/ICH5 chipset, Pentium IV with Hyperthreading. ACPI/APM, S-ATA support, Enhanced IDE enabled.

Windows XP works just fine with this hardware.

Knoppix with linux 2.4 boots up just fine except no sound. The i810_audio and soundcore drivers don't seem to want to load on boot, and even when I do it by hand, KDE doesn't recognize them.

Trying Linux 2.6 gives me a horribly slow boot, with a looooong wait at the Knoppix KDE desktop screen before I get a message box saying something to the effect that the process managing the file system ended unexpectedly. Then nothing works at all. No desktop icons, nothing.

Any help would be appreciated.