Problem Booting Knoppix on Dell Inspiron 5150

[jdykstra]

I tried to boot knoppix 3.6 from the boot CD. I tell it to load from kernal 2.4 and everything seems to be runnging smotthly until "pcmcia found starting cardmgr" shows up. After that my CD-ROM drive stops and nothing more happens.

In addition to that, the computer runs REALLY hot when I'm trying to load the CD. It was running so hot at one point that the computer shut down to prevent itself from further overheating.

Anyone know anything about either of these problems?

[Harry Kuhman]

No knowledge about the Dell Inspiron 5150 specifically to offer. Do you need the pcmcia support? If not you could disable it with a "cheat-code" and that might help. (If you think you need it for something like a wireless card you might research that a bit, you might not be able to use your specific pcmcia card anyway for other reasons.) As to the overheating, I see this even under Windows on my desktop while booting Windows. After booting Windows settles down, but Knoppix may not have power management in it for your particular chip set (again, don't know about the Dell Inspiron 5150 but I know it doesn't support power management properly for my HP ze4210). In my case my notebook runs hot and eats battery but does not overheat; maybe you will be OK if you can get past the boot hang.

I think the cheat-code that might help is nopcmcia, but you might want to follow the documentation link at the top of the page and check me on that. You may need others also to get fully booted (I need a combination of 2 codes before the notebook would boot with recent Knoppix versions, took me six months to find the right combination (it wasn't my highest priority)).

[jdykstra]

Thank's man. I got knoppix working on my laptop but not loading pcmcia. Of course, this means I can't use my wireless card to access the internet. The card is a Dell TrueMobile 1300 WLAN Mini-PCI Card (if that helps). I've done some searching online and found a lot of people having trouble getting wireless to work using Knoppix. Where I do find solutions, I find a lot of computer jargon that I don't do as well with as I would like. I found this thing called driverloader that's supposed to make it work that had me download a .deb file but I'm not sure how to use it. Anyone have any ideas on making a wireless card work with a Knoppix livecd?

[Harry Kuhman]

Thank's man. I got knoppix working on my laptop but not loading pcmcia. Of course, this means I can't use my wireless card to access the internet......

So what else is new? I've never gotten any of my pcmcia wireless cards to work with Knoppix. Some people have, you may want to do some research in the Networking forum. Not that such information will help much until you can boot with pcmcia working. In 3.7 you might try the other Kernel (I'm guessing that you are using the 2.4 kernel, if so try the knoppix26 cheat code for the 2.6 kernel), maybe that will help, otherwise try 3.8 when you can get it or even older versions of Knoppix and see if you can find any that will let you use pcmcia. Of course, someone may actually be able to figure out what your pcmcia problem is and resolve it, but that someone isn't me. Good luck.