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
Dell PowerEdge R720 Server - 2x8c CPU,256Gb RAM, 128Gb SSD/3x600Gb SAS, Proxmox
$340.00
DELL PowerEdge R730XD 24x 2.5" Server Dual 750W Dual Heatsink - BareBones TESTED
$299.99
Supermicro 4U 36 Bay Storage Server 2.4Ghz 8-C 128GB 1x1280W Rails TrueNAS ZFS
$721.06
Dell PowerEdge R630 8SFF 2.6Ghz 20-Core 128GB Mem 4x1G RJ-45 NIC 2x750W PSU
$399.04
INTEL XEON GOLD 6148 20 Core SR3B6 2.4GHZ 27.5MB Processor @24
$99.99
Intel Xeon Gold 6140 SR3AX 2.3GHz 18-Core Processor CPU
$39.99
Intel Xeon Gold 6138 2.0GHz 27.5MB 20-Core 125W LGA3647 SR3B5
$46.00
Intel Xeon E5-2690V2 3.00GHz 10-Core (SR1A5) Processor CPU READ DESCRIPTION
$12.00
HP Workstation Z640 2x Xeon E5-2623V4 32GB Ram 512 SSD Quadro K420 Linux GA
$243.59
Dell Precision 5810 Tower Intel Xeon E5-1603v3 2.8GHz 8GB RAM 500GB HDD W10P GPU
$129.99