Whew!!! Looks like I may have dodged a bullet. Was on the fence about trying either Mandrake or RH. Took the RH 9.x plunge. Now, I'm glad I did. Built an nmap/ethereal machine.

Anyway, this is reminicent of the problems with the S3 video cards a few years ago.. I had no end of problems with installing several of the Linux distros on systems that used any of the S3 video implementations or chipsets. One install attempt blew out the monitor.

Yeah, operating systems can get to areas in hardware that can cause damage.