Ok, I tried knoppix expert; it just gave me the lonely penguin again. No questions, prompts, anything.

I'm pretty sure now that CD burning reliability is not the cause. I got my hands on some software to create ISO images from a CD, so I created a new ISO from the CD I burned. The MD5s of the ISO images are exactly the same, and file-compare agrees; they have the same contents. So by process of elimination it must be something between Knoppix and my hardware, or maybe just something I haven't done right.

Any ideas how to go about troubleshooting this? I love helping to fix bugs, maybe my system would be a good test case?

Thanks,

-- Joren