knoppix fails to load properly

[duncanwilliams]

hi, i'm completely new to all this linux / knoppix etc. I got a cd from my university that you can boot directly from that runs knoppix on your pc. However, after the cd loads it comes up with a welcome screen that lets you enter text, then the screen goes blank. Can anyone tell me how to get it to work? I appreciate there's not a whole lot of info here, but i don't know what i need to specify. this is the verasion i am using :

MDP KNOPPIX
Version 0.3.0a ProE
Fri Oct 28 23:57:50 BST 2005

[psic]

Not sure exactly what's wrong (do you enter a username and password? or does it just show a splashscreen and then go blank?) but you might find this usefull:
http://www-mdp.eng.cam.ac.uk/CD/load...tml#init_blank
(this site has more info on mdp knoppix which you might find usefull)

[AndrewB]

hmm, what graphics card do you have?
sounds to me like it is going to load X, but fails some how

[anomie]

Yep, you can tell it explicitly your graphic card.

Normally when the screen goes blank with knoppix it is choosing a resolution that is too high, or the framebuffer support is screwing things up. (Maybe you have a lousy graphics card, who knows.)

Anyway, next time at the boot: prompt try:

knoppix screen=800x600

If that does not work, then at the boot: prompt try:

knoppix vga=normal

[psic]

Another thing to try would be knoppix26 (according to the link i gave you earlier). It seems this version of knoppix uses the 2.4 kernel. The 2.6 might fix things.

[duncanwilliams]

Thanks to everyone who have advice. When the CD boots, i get a splashscreen and a boot prompt that says it's ISOLINUX. I tried everything anyone mentioned and got the following responses:

knoppix26
could not find kernel image knoppix26
( blank screen apart from three small blue dots at the top of the screen)

knoppix vga=normal
Uncompressing linux . . . Ok, booting the kernel
(then it hangs)

failsafe
(goes through a lon glist of hardware detection (failing most of them))
Welcome to the KNOPPIX live Linux-on-CD!
Can't find KNOPPIX filesystem, sorry. Dropping you down to a (very limited) shell. Press reset button to quit.

All other prompts mentioned in your replies I entered gave me just a blank screen with three blue dots.

My video card is an NVIDIA GeForce Go 6600 with Integrated RAMDAC. I'm not really sure but it seems to me either that the system can't find the kernel or that it doesn't like my graphics card. Please help me to figure out what's going on here as I'm sure there's a really simple fix.

[anomie]

How about trying the latest version of knoppix - should be like 4.0.2 or so.

http://www.knoppix.org/

Download and burn. Your version is either really old (0.3.0a ProE?) or I am missing something obvious.