Ok.. This post is more out of curiosity, than anything else..
It's been a few days since I got VL up and running, and everything is going smoothly. However, I cannot understand why my laptop threw such a tantrum on the initial install! Why does it go into kernel panic? And why did it not detect my drives on the first install?
Also, there is one observation. The first time I installed VL-6.0-Light, I chose the 'multi-level gui'. However, this never started. I could never figure out why. It never gave me an option of selecting a text-based ui either. The only way I could get around this was to re-install the whole thing, and choose 'text-based' login. This time, I successfully reached the log-in page.
But, the excitement was not over as yet! I tried to 'startx', but in vain. It kept telling me that my xorg.conf file was not right. I checked the file to find it empty! However, there were some other file xorg.conf.back (back-up file?), which I copied to xorg.conf. Soon, all was working!
Is my case a one-off? Or is this a well-documented set of events in the installation? I am extremely happy with VL, but the installation made the distro seem rather omenous!