How to Trackdown a Hardware Failure with Knoppix?

[Jonathan Hutchins]

On Sunday 10 October 2004 11:18 am, Coffee Grounds wrote:

> My Knoppix HD install simply will not boot (hangs when X attempts to
> launch) and booting off the CD is unsuccessful as well.
> I can boot Knoppix off the CD in failsafe mode. 

Sounds to me like Knoppix doesn't like your video card.  You might consider 
the Xwindows documentation at tldp.org.  Install knoppix (or some other 
flavor of debian) in text mode and work out the GUI after you're up.

If you're not that ambitious,  you might try the live CD from some other 
distro like SuSE or Mandrake and see if they auto-detect your hardware any 
better.  Mandrake, SuSE and RedHat have tended to be a little more current on 
drivers than debian, but Knoppix has always done amazingly well.

I was surprized myself when it wouldn't work with the GUI on my system at 
work, which was built to run linux (A Rage XL AGP 2X, which should be common 
enough...), but I didn't persue it because I only needed text mode anyway.