It was the earlier graphic. It turned out to be some assertion getting thrown in the bit that discovers the drive geometry before partitioning. I managed to muddle through the text mode install, telling it to ignore the assertions as they came up. The remainder of the install took 5 hours, and it didn't set up the operator user properly, but everything else was just fine. It was easy enough to fix. On top of that, my new "quickstep" driver module works beautifully, and can deliver 30000 steps/s to all axes simultaneously. It'll be in your mailbox shortly. All in all, I couldn't be happier with my new EMC-based setup! It's miles better than the *ahem* DOS based program that I was using before (it was the only thing that could run the steppers fast enough OOtB). I took your advice and used xfce, which works just fine, and it wasn't hard to figure out how to add the launcher for EMC in the task panel. Thanks, Matt