Hardly any Live CD's boot...

[dalinux_n00bie]

So i'm really frustrated...
I went on a Linux Download frenzy in hopes of finding a distro that will work with well with my laptop. I have a Nvidia 8200M with approx 800ish MB of shared video (pretty good though) and AMD athlon x2 64 running at 1.9 GHz, and a conexant/nvidia audio (integrated) and a Athros 5007 wireless N card.
I had Kubuntu running on it, but there are some quirks i dont' like so i'm attempting to find something that will work, well here is what i downloaded and what happened:

Vector Linux 5.9 (live and install): started to boot, and couldn't find the SATA cd drive that it booted from! so got a minimal shell and had to reboot. Fail safe settings did not work ether.

Mepis 8.0 BETA: Booted under fail safe. Automaticly detected my wireless, but Audio was scratchy and video horrible (800X600 on a 1280X800)

Mint 5 BETA: wouldn't boot. period. nada. zilch. nothing.

Ubuntu Ultimate 64-bit: fatal kernel error claiming that the processor was broken.

Ubuntu Ultimate 32-bit: about as good as Mepis, but didn't detect wireless.

OpenSuse 11: had to disable the integrated ath5k driver to get it to boot, but then the mouse had issues.

So does anyone know of a good laptop friendly distro? My laptop is a Compaq Preserio CQ50.

[Cool01]

NOTE: I am NOT suggesting that you actually try the OpenSuSE Factory distribution. That would be bad advice. However:

For your amusement only:

Download the "i586" iso of the installer for the Factory software. It is at:

Index of /factory/iso

When you boot this the CD, it will have an option to run a "firmware" checking tool. This will test your computer's BIOS.

Run the test and look for failures and warnings.

I have only done this on one computer so far and it was a BIOS that was suspicious. It turned out to have 4 failures. I am not going to berate the company at this point because I do not know how common these failures are yet. But I have a feeling that this BIOS might be a particularly bad one.

If you try this, the resulting information might help you in the future. I do not know.

And of course, do check the HP website to see if there is an update for your current BIOS.

[rinjo]

i had faced the sata problem with my laptop.
The work around that I found was to boot into the BIOS and then to disable the SATA support.

If this doesn't work for you, then you can obviously re-enable the sata.

good luck!

[IDZignIt]

I've had real good luck w/ Red Hat, and their Fedora on an old laptop.
Unbuntu, PHLAK, KNOPPIX, SUSE, have all been good. I finally settled on Fedora for this old laptop. The Red Hat install I had before I couldn't update at all. The others have had some issue or two that just bothered me.