Me or my computer or both

[jaffar at jeffstudio.net]

Hi guys.  Over the past year, I have been trying to install all flavors of linux, from fedora to debiant, gentoo to grml, slackware to ubantu, all without any modicum of success.  I am running a panthium i368 build machine with a windows xp box installed.  I have a 2.4 gb processor, with 1.8 gb of ram and an external dectalk synth.  Typing the various installation commands for the fvarious flavors of linux will either yield some nonsense from my dectalk synth when speakup tries to interact with it, or, for the majority of the linux flavors, typing in the appropriate commands during the boot prompt yields nothing at all, not even a twitter from my dectalk synth.  Mind you, this failure certainly does not arise from a lack of help and assistance from list members, but try as i might with all the advise and hints given by really helpful list members, nothing seems to work.  I have updated the firmware on my dectalk synth, and i have thoroughly read all installation instructions for all the various installation procedure which accrues with the different linux flavors, but i've had 0 success so far.  So what have i got to do next, that's my biggest question.  I am very interested to venture into linux, but success with it seems to have eluded me.  If there is anyone of you here running both windows xp and linux on the same machine, I'd certainly be interested to hear from you.  All help given to a desperate guy here would be greatly appreciated.  Cheers!