I have had terrible trouble with 7.4.2 and 8.1.0 on a Dell XPS9360. Whether booting from the KNOPPIX DVD (burn iso) or from a boot USB (I use Pendrive's Universal-USB-Installer v. 1.9.8.0, there may be other or later versions) all I got was a blank screen. But a certain amount of whirring suggested to me that the live version was in fact progressing and available. After a lot of messing about with vga=xxx in the KERNEL stanza in /boot/isolinux/isolinux.cfg I iterated to the best, sparsest and most portable version of this configuration file that I have EVER had. It reads
DEFAULT console
TIMEOUT 40
PROMPT 1
LABEL console
KERNEL linux
APPEND initrd=minirt.gz vga=893 lang=uk 1
LABEL video
KERNEL linux
APPEND initrd=minirt.gz vga=893 lang=uk #
By portable I mean this works on an ancient (really ancient) Samsung, any number of Dells in all configurations / ages, likewise Fujitsus. All screens from 800x600 to 1920x1080.
Still can't get 8.1.0 to work using a boot USB (DVD is fine). The architecture dictated by Pendrive leads to a configuration location error ("Can't find ..") from the very start. Even mimicking the geography of the 7.4.2 boot USB does not mend this.
Fergus
For Lenovo IdeaPad 3 15IIL05 15IML05 15ADA05 15ARE05 Palmrest Keyboard Touchpad
$59.25
NEW Palmrest Keyboard For Lenovo Thinkpad E15 Gen 2 20T8 20T9 Black 5M10W64513
$80.99
Genuine Lenovo IdeaPad 5-15IIL05 5-15ITL05 palmrest BL keyboard 5CB0Z31242
$118.90
Lenovo IP 5 16IAU7 16" 2.5K Chromebook i3-1215U 8GB Ram 128GB eMMC Chrome OS
$219.99
Lenovo Ideapad 1i 15.6" FHD Notebook Intel Core i5-1235U 8GB RAM 256GB SSD
$349.99
Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga 11e 11.6" 2in1 Touch Intel Core i3 4GB RAM 128GB SSD Win10
$59.00
Lenovo Legion Pro 5 16IRX8 16" i7-13700HX GEFORCE RTX 4070 32GB 1TB SSD W11H
$1169.99
Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Yoga G5 i5-10310U 1.7GHZ/16GB/512GB NVMe
$274.99
Lenovo Flex 7 14IRU8 14" 2.2K Touch Intel Core i7-1355U 16GB 1TB SSD W11H
$549.99
Lenovo K14 AMD Laptop, 14" FHD IPS LED , Ryzen 5 5600U, GB, 256GB SSD
$569.00