What is the difference in various Live cd's?

Hallo All

One question: I am trying to run the various live cd's on a Toshiba Satellite 1805-S274 laptop.
The following distro's work:
SLAX, knoppix MIB 3.2, Vector and MandrakeMove.
These do NOT work:
Knoppix Live, Feather, Flonix and Puppy.

Does anyone here that has more knowledge of Linux than myself have any idea what the difference between these version are? The problem is not with the cd itself. It does work on my desktop. I want to try my hand at my own live cd compilation but it needs to work on the laptop to have any value.

I managed to do the following with Morphix:

Using Morphix liveCD on Toshiba Satellite 1805-S274:

All seems well up to the following message:
Scanning for Harddisk partitions and creating /etc/fstab...
At this stage, the boot process just stops and sit there.
If I then do a ctrl-c, the bootprocess proceeds seemingly normal.

hda: drive not ready for command
ide0: reset: success
hda: irq timeout: status=0x58 {Driveready SeekComplete DataRequest}
hda: status timeout: status=0xd0 {busy}

Pushing the on/off button at imme

morphix dma seems to give a normal boot. Didn't need to do this with the knoppix MiB 3.2 edition.

MD5 hash of the download matched. CD Data integrity test ok.

Under Knoppix and Feather (no idea about Flonix and Puppy), try booting with:
"knoppix dma"
or maybe even:
"knoppix nodma". If all else fails, try booting with "knoppix noauto". Press F2 at the boot screen for more helpful boot options.

The only difference I noticed between 3.2 and 3.3 was that there was more autodetection, and in my case, I had to select noddc to disable the monitor detection as I had a laptop with an unrecognizable display.

Knoppix 3.3 has more autodetection.

Some LiveCD's are compiled for the 686 and up processors only, so they don't run on a AMDk6-2 at all.
Some distros, such as clusterknoppix, have a 2.88 meg bootimage instead of the 1.44 meg bootimage, which means that my old laptop freaks out when it sees it (Bios does not handle the 2.88 meg El Torito Booting)
In that case, I had to resort to using a Smart Boot Manager floppy disk to get past the bios booting.


newer distros tend to drop support for older hardware.
I doubt that anyone compiles for .386 any more.

some distros don't have knoppix's autodetect for everything, so they require the user to enter in stuff like screen resolution, depth, mouse type, etc.

Maybe when they update the cheatcode list, they should tell what new features they have in from the previous version.