Get into the habit of bugging folks here. I started out about the same with AOLserver/ACS/OpenACS: Linux on a stack of floppies. That was kicked off when I decided Windows NT and SQL Server were too expensive and difficult to manage (and too expensive!, did I mention that?)
The 5 minutes or 5 days thing can still occur. It took me a week to find a Linux distribution which enabled most of my laptop features. But x86_64 is new and free software takes time. Interesting thing is that the distribution I found had a semi-full-featured boot cd, so could try before installing the whole thing.
