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
Apple Macbook Pro 8-Core i9 16" 1TB 64GB RAM Space Gray MVVK2LL/A 2019 USED
$898.00
Intel Xeon Platinum 8356H Processors 8-Core CPU 3.90GHz-4.40GHz 190W LGA4189
$3882.12
Intel - Core i9-13900K 13th Gen 24 cores 8 P-cores + 16 E-cores 36M Cache, 3 ...
$689.99
Intel - Core i7-13700K 13th Gen 16 cores 8 P-cores + 8 E-cores 30M Cache, 3.4...
$489.99
AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 16-core 32-thread Desktop Processor
$319.99
Apple Mac Pro Processor Tray 5,1 2010 2012 2.4ghz 8 core
$79.99
Intel - Core i7-12700K Desktop Processor 12 (8P+4E) Cores up to 5.0 GHz Unloc...
$419.99
Intel - Core i9-12900K Desktop Processor 16 (8P+8E) Cores up to 5.2 GHz Unloc...
$619.99
HP Workstation Z640 2x Xeon E5-2623V4 32GB Ram Dual 256GB SSD K420 Linux GA
$234.98
Dell Precision 3630 8-Core i9-9900K 3.6GHz 32GB 512GB SSD WIN 11P
$479.99