Sounds to me like you may have CD burner problems or possibly many bad downloads. If I were you, I'd check MD5 sums on your .iso image downloads. Also, if you are talking about hardware issues with your laptop, then you may need to use some boot options, like noapic, noapm or nolapic. Since you didn't say what your issues were, who can tell.
I've actually heard of some people finally having success with the OPL3Sax sound chips with some of the LiveCDs. Which is good news, but about 2 years and one Diet Coke too late for me. Anyone recall the Coke I spilled all over the perfectly fine, older, free laptop I had.
For Apt-pin issues, I was referring to stuff pinned by Mepis. It would either keep me from installing or uninstalling software. Many times, just an upgrade would be impossible, due to some specific version being required. With the switch to Ubuntu repositories, and other internal fixes, some/most of this should go away. Does anyone have apt-get update/upgrade called in a cron job to stay up to date?
-----Original Message----- From: On Behalf Of Jack Sent: Sunday, April 09, 2006 7:58 PM
snip
On the Ubuntu front. Every version I've installed has had hardware issues, preventing a clean install. I've totally failed to build a Kubuntu CD that would install clean (whereas sometimes Ubuntu would install clean). It's been a long time since I've had a distro that would flake out on me on some hardware. I've run Mepis for many years and never had much issues with it. It's still a nice distro.
As far as apt-get issues, I have a few apt-pin problems, but if someone has apt-pin problems it is <<< always >>> the fault of the person who is maintaining the system and has no relation to the flavor of Debian or Debian itself. Basically, you should never apt-pin, and if you do you should be prepared to pay the price. The price being eventual apt-pin problems.