On Sat, 12 Oct 2002, Benjamin Fisher wrote:

> I installed RedHat 8.0 on the machine, but it locks when it gets to the
> 
> Bringing up loopback interface . . .

It may have alrady set up the loopback interface and is trying to find 
other interfaces.  I'd bet it is trying to look for an ethernet interface 
and will timeout after five minutes.  I remember tracing through redhat's 
init scripts and finding a lot of stuff I didn't have or need.  Removing 
the junk left me with a nice bootup.

> Not sure why.  Anyone have any idea?

Redhat has a famous QA department.  Is that a good enough answer?

> Also the floppy disk which was made during the install process failed to
> do anything worthwhile.  Like boot.

If I remember right, redhat has been using disk images greater than 1.4MB.  
CD's also use floppy images in their ISO image to boot.  Using redhat's
larger boot image often confuses many computer's BIOS start up.  One of
these computers that cannot boot from a redhat CD is my new toshiba
laptop.  This is another famous redhat QA showstopping disaster.

I had to make a slackware boot floppy to get a working redhat system on my 
laptop.

> I'm thinking of trying mandrake if nobody else knows what might be the
> problem.

I had a smooth install experience with Mandrake's install.  Its a shame 
redhat does great development work, but leaves it to others to package 
flawlessly.