I finally got the RAM for my new system today. It now consists of:

• Asus A7V266-E Motherboard
• Athlon XP-1700+
• IBM Deskstar 40GB
• 256MB 2100 DDR
• Plextor Plexwriter 12/10/32A

But I'm not really getting anywhere. Debian will detect neither the hard drive nor the NIC (it's a 3Com Fast Etherlink -- we're not looking at what you'd call an unusual card here), and Mandrake poops out at "Please wait: Looking for available packages." In fact, I've been watching this pretty purple screen tell me that it's looking for available packages for the past 30 minutes. Other terminals tell me "Entering step `Choose packages to install'" and "reading /usr/lib/rpm/ rpmrc...done"; there's nothing to indicate that anything is in any way wrong. tomsrtbt runs nicely, as does a RAM-testing boot floppy. So there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the hardware, at least that I can determine.

As you might imagine, I'm a little frustrated right now. I went out and bought each part after researching it to determine its Linux compatability, and I'm still out of luck.

Bah.