Well, thanks to a comment from A. J. at UT-Knoxville — I know that my RHEL/Fedora problems under Virtual PC 7.0 are not only my own.
I have gotten Ubuntu installed. Only to have the X Configuration go wacky and produce screens that look more like fractals:
than Gnome desktops. I’ve played with the /etc/X11/xorg.conf to no avail at the moment. Great abstract art generator though.
But hey — I’m further along there! (next I’ll try suse)
[update] — Well, while I edited my xorg.conf file to remove the option to do 24 bit color, I failed to changed the “DefaultDepth” parameter (I think it’s a tad silly that you can set the DefaultDepth to an option not in the file, but that’s just me). Changing that gives me a rather happy ubuntu install. I was reminded to look at this from the ubuntu wiki.
For the record, the OpenSuse install appears to completely fail, but the only thing I tried there was booting off the cd — I’m not sure my cd image is even good.