Life is getting tough for open source. I purchased two bare-bones Intel motherboards complete with Core Duo chips and had the worst time getting the SuSE Linux Distribution (first 10.0 and then 10.2) to run on the platforms. The problem is that the new hardware had some radically different features, specifically a controller located off the motherboard, not supported by the Linux kernel included with SuSE Linux 10.0.
"Not supported" is decidedly bad news for open source. Intel is the largest chip manufacturer and, possibly, the largest manufacturer of motherboards for personal computers. The kind of headache that I experienced trying to install the distribution on the platforms is certainly not the kind of headache that the average user will tolerate.
My initial attempts were met by dark monitors, and repeated failed installations that bounced me back to manual installation screens. Error messages were weird: "Image Not Found" despite the fact that the factory disks were loaded in the Sony DVD/CD Reader Writer that I purchased with each of the systems. My calls to support did not produce a fix. I was pleased, however, to see that the typical brush off from SuSE technical support for folks with older copies of the operating system was not the order of the day. Support was willing to work the problem(s) through, but was at a loss to offer a working remedy.
When I loaded the DVD into our Mac Mini and FTP'd over to the Mac I was able to install the operating system on both of our systems. But, as of yet, I have not gotten the faster of the two boxes (2.4 Ghz processor, 2GBs memory, etc) to work with the Sony Drive and the Operating System.