Linux???? is it real

When I tried Linux for the first time, I got all sorts of strange problems - fdisk would ignore the keyboard - sometimes, I'd get odd output, etc. It turned out (after a lot of looking at schematics, then at the logic analyser, then at the schematic again) that my memory board had a subtle timing problem (caused, in part, by the fact that it was a 2-sided board with no ground plane, and the ground was bouncing all over the place). MS-DOS programs (even ones that used extended memory) never noticed this. Memory diagnostics, left running overnight, never found it. But Linux did. So check your memory... Also, Linux sometimes uses hardware in ways that MS-DOS doesn't. I've had a cheap clone keyboard fail to work with Linux as it didn't correctly implement a couple of the commands in the IBM Techref. I doubt this is the problem, thought. -tony