Well, I received my server today. Quite surprisingly the packaging was a bit poor, with only bubble wrap wrapped around it. The RAID controller and PCI adaptor were loose inside. After some fretting I eventually got it running and booting into the installed Mandriva. I then started to install Ubuntu which would but install due to an apic problem.

4294669.209000] ..MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC

I managed to disable this on boot (with help) to install which all went fine, then on reboot, after disabling apic again, there was a new error.

isapnp: No Plug & Play device found

And after disabling PnP (Plug and Play) in the Bios and rebooting I get yet another error –
BUG: soft lockup detected on CPU#0!

Which I cannot get around but a thread on Launchpad suggests trying Edgy Eft Knot-3 which is downloading at the moment, so I’ll give it a try in the morning.

Update

Edgy Eft was superb and installed first time (after I removed the faulty RAID controller). All is good, loud but good.