[Follow-ups set to gmane.linux.centos.general]
My wife had been running CentOS 6.4 almost since its inception; then her PC broke down.
We got a PC from System76, and Ubuntu turned out utterly unsuitable for us, as expected -- as bad for us as Gnome3. (I had previously bought a System76 net book (starling iirc), and immediately installed the then current Fedora; all has been well with that.
This time, alas!, I thought I should let her try Ubuntu; so I tried running it myself for an houror two to get it set up and tweaked.
I couldn't even find any of the apps I wanted to tweak! So I put in an install disk for CentOS, and rebooted.
It never came near finishing the reboot. Up popped the following:
Detected CPU family 6 model 94.
Warning: Intel CPU model -- this hardware has not undergone upstream testing. Please see
http://wiki.centos.org/FAQ for more information.
tsc: Fast TSC calibration failed.
I have consulted that FAQ and more, and also System76's. I've consulted and tried more other things than most of you likely want to hear about. No joy.
I've also tried rebooting without any install disk, with a Fedora install disk, with various helps such as super grub disk, and finally even with DBAN.
The machine doesn't even find any of those. On any reboot, it just goes to that CentOS error message, and stops.
I've also googled for '"upstream testing" hardware'
Any thoughts or experience??.