Knoppix hangs-up while booting

[artur]

Hello all,

tried Knoppix for the first time yesterday, I managed to run it in the failsave mode but on that mode my mouse (Miscrosoft wheel USB mouse) didn't work. If I run Knoppix as full with no cheats, thescreen shows black with the pinguin and the cursor blinks. Nothing else happens and I did wait quite a long time.

How can I boot Knoppix and make it work at least so the mouse would work on failsafe?

Thanks for your help!

[eon]

I don't know what your system specs are but you might want to try some of the ideas
listed at the bottom of the cheatcodes page: http://download.linuxtag.org/knoppix/knoppix-cheatcodes.txt

e.g. "*) Try "knoppix pci=irqmask=0x0e98" if (you have a notebook and) your
PS/2 mouse doesn't work. (Possibly caused by a BIOS-flaw on your board,
BIOS updates can help.) Sometimes, switching to the text console with
Control-Alt-F1 and back to the X-screen with Control-F5 solves the
problem without rebooting, since the X server reinitializes the mouse
driver during that procedure."

"In case of a failing hardware autodetection, try booting with any of
the "no-" options as shown in the table above, like in
knoppix noagp noaudio noapm noapic acpi=off nodma nopcmcia noscsi nousb
to skip some critical parts of the autodetection system."

Check out all the suggestions I just copied & pasted two (above)
As an alternative you could try kanotix.