Okay...I was finally able to install knoppix.

It seems to me that there are some bad sectors on my hd, but I was able to prevent that from screwing up the installation of essential packages by increasing the size of the swap partition (up to about 900 MB), so that most of the bad sectors occur in that partition. If I start swapping, its time to get a new computer, because I can't add any more RAM to it.

One thing I do like is that even though some packages didn't install correctly, the installation process continued. With RH, the process would simply hang without notification beyond "there was an error during installation" or something like that, and with MDK, while it would mention a particular app not installing and asking me if I would like to continue, it would nevertheless hang at the end of the package installaion phase. Knoppix informed me of the problem, but kept going if it could.

The only packages that didn't install correctly were doc pages, anyway. I fired things up and test drove all the apps I could see. The only things which don't work are spell checking within KOffice (Abiword and OO are fine) and the game Falcon's Eye, which I've never played.

I have a friend whose giving me a new hd, and I'll read up on compatibility and installation while playing around for awhile. If the current hd doesn't get any worse, fine. If it does, that's fine too....all my work is either ascii text (fortran programs, latex) or .rtf files, and easily fit on floppies.

Thanks for your help.