Knoppix: unbelievably good, esp. as a debian installer :)

My problem (and it's occurred on several varieties of Knoppix on a few different machines) is with sound. What happens is that the pleasant voice at bootup that says "beginning startup sequence" gets stuck; it starts skipping on the word "sequence," and until the sound server is killed, the system just keeps saying the 2nd syllable over and over, so it sounds like "wence-wence-wence-wence ..." etc.

Data points: Here are three machines on which I've enountered this problem:

- Shuttle SS40 system (Duron 1700) with built in just-about-everything (http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...,485198,00.asp) using a FS40 FlexATX DDR motherboard.

- Compaq iPaq (500MHz Intel PIII), another fully-integrated beast with an Intel 810e chipset.

[Note, for these two, and using the Knoppix CD I burned in September or October, I can overcome this by specifying "pci=bios" as a boot-time option, something I learned from a random someone's web page about Linux on the shuttle system. Without that option, little things like the integrated network card are ignored.]

- a generic 1GHz PIII laptop I encountered visiting my dad's house (his laptop); I did not know about and so did not try the pci=bios option on that.

And contrariwise, Knoppix sound works fine on another system of mine (including the Athlon system I'm tapping this one, using the integrated Apollo sound). That's the system I'm typing this from, in fact :)

*However* with the newer Knoppix I burned last month, I get the sound stuttering on the Shuttle system even if I specify pci=bios. Again, everything else seems to work great ..

So what is it about me, knoppix and sound? I've seen this happen on a few other systems as well. So, while Knoppix does a great job otherwise of hardware detection etc, on a majority of the systems I've so far tried I get this stuttering. I can see this being a big turn-off to someone who expected working sound on their system. Maybe I'm just a statistical anomoly, and it works better for everyone else -- I hope so.

I inquired about this a little while ago on the knoppix IRC channel and hit some helpful people but no one who knew what the secret was, if there is one. Any ideas? I'd rather have no sound than "wence-wence-wence ..."

Thanks,

Tim