Yeah, wouldn't that be nice.

Hardware here is an HP Pavilion Slimline s3500f, with and AMD Athlon X2
processor and a nVidia 61xx video chipset.

And it really doesn't like the Ubuntu Live CD, the 64 bit version is only
marginally better than the 32 bit version.

I get a flashing video screen. The 64 bit 8.10 Live CD is almost useable.

For whatever reason Mandriva Linux One i586.iso with the Gnome desktop runs very
nicely on this HP hardware, very sharp native resolution display - Samsung
SyncMaster 2253BW monitor, so I know that it will run some kind of Linux.