My Mac-geek friend is experimenting with Knoppix on a couple of laptops.

Yesterday he did aptget update on a working Knoppix 3.6 HDD load (about six months since last update) in a Panasonic CF-48 laptop. After about eight hours of downloading (on a decent cable modem connection!) it locked up at the end of a package install. After a forced shutdown and a reboot it hangs up right after the LILO message. Caps Lock and Scroll Lock indicators are both flashing. That machine is dead for the moment.

Today we did an HDD Knoppix 3.7 install on a Panasonic CF-51. Setting up the HDD with qtparted from the 2.6 kernel on the 3.7 CD failed because qtparted (gui and cli) kept hanging up. Running it from the 2.4 kernel on the same CD completed qtparted and the rest of the HDD install with no problems. Booting into the 2.4 kernel HDD load with no problems, ran a few apps, and left it alone for a while. When we came back to it, it was hung up solid with no keyboard response and the Caps Lock and Scroll Lock indicators both flashing.

Booting to the HDD 2.6 kernel (selected from LILO menu) seems to avoid the hang up problems on the CF-51. We only started using 2.4 because of the problem with qtparted.

Reloading the CF-48 will be tried tonight or tomorrow. Not sure if both kernels are available from the LILO menu on that one.

Could this be some APCI vs. 2.4 kernel vs. 2.6 kernel wierdness? How would we proceed to troubleshoot that? I am assuming that we should not have to run qtparted under 2.4 and then switch to 2.6 to get things working, or is that a common fix?