tburger: Yes. That's ridiculous. I remember when I upgraded Ubuntu to a higher version (don't really remember which one) installation process went fine I got logon screen and then I got hang. Few hours later by test & error I finally discovered that it was caused by SpeedStep technology - when I disabled it in BIOS - tadam! Do I have to mention that in previous version of Ubuntu (the one I migrated from) SpeedStep worked just fine ..?
In the meantime, I installed the latest CentOS 6.3. No problems there whatsoever, and it just oozes of that certain kind of straightforward professionalism that I feel is missing from many other distros. :) Then again, also in it I only get max 1024x768 resolution, and googling for it, apparently it is simply because these Linux distros don't recognize my 5:4 monitor, so they offer those basic resolutions only, just so that I wouldn't accidentally break any old CRT monitor.
I presume I need to google for the exact (horizontal&vertical) frequencies that my old flatscreen monitor supports, and then edit those values manually to some Linux config file. That should do the trick.
Anyways, maybe I'll still try the Mint installation later today... I'll have to decide if I stay with CentOS (which I kinda like, partly due to my work with RHEL), or Mint/Ubuntu, because the latter are probably better optimized for home and media use.
