Quoting Erik Christiansen (dvalin@internode.on.net):
Well, this one found that Debian wouldn't install on hardware he'd just paid good money for, nearly a decade ago.
This was often the case _if_ you were unaware of the many extremely good third-party installer images. At any given time, there are a huge number of these, and there were (e.g.) a number of live-CD Debian installers long before the Debian Live Project (live.debian.net) existed. I even got so tired of hearing how _the_ Debian installer image was insufficient that I made a Web page to point people to (and of course, it is now a bit out of date): http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Debian/installers.html My own current favourite way to install Debian is Aptosid (formerly Sidux). Live CD with installer, comes out every quarter.