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
Intel Xeon E5-2689v4 10 Core 3.1G - SR2T7
$125.00
Intel - Core i7-12700K Desktop Processor 12 (8P+4E) Cores up to 5.0 GHz Unloc...
$242.99
Intel - Core i9-14900K 14th Gen 24-Core 32-Thread - 4.4GHz (6.0GHz Turbo) Soc...
$539.99
Intel 6 Core i5-8600 3.1GHZ Desktop Processor SR3X0
$50.00
Intel Core i5-6500 Quad-Core Processor 3.2 GHz 6MB LGA1151
$23.99
Intel Xeon Gold 6142 2.60GHz 16-Core 22MB LGA-3647 Server Processor SR3AY
$65.00
Intel - Core i7-13700K 13th Gen 16 cores 8 P-cores + 8 E-cores 30M Cache, 3.4...
$364.99
Intel - Core i7-14700K 14th Gen 20-Core 28-Thread - 4.3GHz (5.6GHz Turbo) Soc...
$399.99
AMD Ryzen 7 2700X CPU Processor 3.7GHz AM4
$74.99
AMD EPYC 7F52 CPU processor 16 cores 32 threads 3.5GHZ up to 3.9GHZ 240w
$299.00