A long while ago I played with a CD version of Knoppix (I think). I too got a load of grief trying to start it .. after a load of messing with graphics driver I did get to a page of sorts but never managed to get to a recognisable GUI and gave up.
I got a load of grief too from installing GIMP on a win9x machine which resulted in a re-install of Win.
So I'm a little sus of open source stuff atm.
(Although I do now have GIMP working successfully on my XP m/c together with OpenOffice which is superb
)