Move your 10Gb hard drive and the extra 128Mb ram to the Celeron, your chances may be better (rather than on the pentium).
Most of the problems you are having are related to RAM. You just dont have much to work with. Avoid Live-CDs. Your text-mode installs should be (more) successful. Try the Ubuntu 8.04 Alternate CD (Ill get back to this)
Also, once installed, you can eat up 256Mb Ram (let alone 128 ) very quickly in a graphical environment. If you want graphical, you shouldnt be using KDE or Gnome. Look into using Fluxbox,Openbox, XFCE or similar.
I know you are new to linux, and this may seem daunting, but your choice of hardware is not making this all that easy. To get things working on such limited hardware, you almost need the command line at some point. Your average desktop distro needs more RAM to run smoothly. You are looking at limited desktop distroś or command line systems.
I think you need an installer that doesnt make you do a full install. You need to be picking what you want installed (which is not much), and build from the ground up. Your installers are doing to much, and that is why they freeze.
If you have access to the internet other than your would-be linux boxes, there are people who can help you (myself included) walk through some command line help, and that might be just enough to get you to a light-weight desktop environment.
My suggestion would be Ubuntu 8.04 Alternate CD, and select ¨Command Line Install¨ as the mode. This will only give you a terminal once it has finished installing. But from the terminal, you can then add fundamental packages to get you up and running.
Assuming your internet works out of the box, you can enter this into a fresh install,
Code:
sudo apt-get install xorg openbox obconf dillo
##When finished successfully, then type...
startx
This is only meant to be an example of keeping it simple.
Gotta go now, if no-else posts within the next few hours, Ill get back to ya.
Good Luck
Bookmarks