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
ASRock B550M Pro SE AM4 DDR4 SATA 6Gb/s 1 PCIe 4.0 x16 Micro ATX Motherboard
$84.99
Asus H81M-C Intel LGA1150 DDR3 Desktop Motherboard MicroATX Socket H3
$23.99
Asus Prime H310M-A R2.0 Intel LGA 1151 DDR4 Desktop Motherboard
$54.99
Gigabyte Z370P D3 ATX Z370 LGA1151 Motherboard (Support Intel 6/7th 8th 9th)
$59.99
ASUS H87I-PLUS, LGA 1150, Intel Motherboard w/ IO Shield
$39.00
MSI MAG Z590 TOMAHAWK WIFI Intel LGA1200 PCIE 4.0 WiFi 6E ATX Motherboard
$129.99
MSI B450M PRO-VDH MAX AM4 AMD B450 USB3.2 Micro-ATX Motherboard
$67.99
MSI H81I LGA1150 MINI-ITX DDR3 Desktop Motherboard With I/O Shield
$32.99
Gigabyte M-ATX motherboard with Intel Core i3 8100 CPU and 8GB DDR4 RAM
$84.00
MSI PRO B650-P WiFi AMD AM5 DDR5 WiFi 6E ProSeries Motherboard
$107.30