Stuck at boot

Well, I got recruited to the Linux world by a friend but I’ve always wanted to try it, so I did and I downloaded the Live CD of openSUSE: KDE. I just wanted to mess around with the desktop in the boot screen before installing and well, it doesn’t work.

I select openSUSE 11.0 and it goes through to the bar loading screen, then hops over to a wall of text which I’m guessing is checking to see if everything is compatible seeing as how on the right side of the screen there are a bunch of ‘done’ text in green. It then stops and works hard on the (sorry i cant exactly remember what it is) hardDX i know there is a X at the end, I’ll go back and do it again to update. But then after doing that it stops loading and goes to a black dos screen with nothing on it but:
(none):confused:
and it wont accept any key pressings of any kind. It just sits there. I left it to sit for about 20 minutes and it doesn’t move.

For clarification it doesn’t even get to Yast at all.

I also tried Mandriva and it did the same thing only instead of (none):confused: it was just an underscore.

If anyone could help me out with this, it would be great. Also i downloaded MD5 and have no idea what I’m supposed to do with it. So any help would be appreciated.
Thanks.

Sounds like it’s trying to start Xorg but cannot as it cannot detect the display adapter in your machine (and thus drops to console only).

What kind of machine do you have? Is it a laptop? What display adapter does it have?

Can you describe the hardware specification used?

The thing that it stops at is:
HAL daemon creating Xconfig

I’m using a dell dimension 3000
desktop
2.8 GHz P4
1.2 GB ram
Radeon 9250 256mb
I can’t tell you anything about the mobo or BIOS because I have no idea myself since I got this computer for free.

If I change the resolution and boot from cd I can get OpenSuse to load. But it only loads at low res. Otherwise, the boot gets stuck at Xconfig and fades to black. This happens with Ubuntu too. I have a new 22" samsung 2232BWplus monitor. What’s wrong?