[ale] H/W Q: Fedora-C3 and Dell's USB keyboard & mouse, SATA drives

[Mills, John M.]

ALErs -

I want to install Linux on a current Dell _Optiplex_G280_ box, but haven't
been successful with RH-7.3, Slackware-10.1, nor Knoppix-3.3. Even when I
swapped out the SATA hard-drive with IDE the and USB mouse with PS-2, at
some point [XFree86?] they all failed to see the USB keyboard. It looked
like a losing battle so I stopped beating on it, dragged out a dumpster-dive
Gateway, and stumbled forward(?) with RH-7.3.

Should I expect Fedora/Core-3 to install on my current Dell (SATA, USB)
hardware configuration? If not, what distribution might work?

Where should I have looked to answer these questions?

TIA.
 - Mills