I've tried all of the cheatcodes that look like they might have anything to do with the video card including failsafe, but no luck. And this is on two separate machines - a Dell 8500 laptop with 512mb RAM, and an Athlon K7 with 392mb RAM. The video cards in question are the Mobility Radeon 9000 and an older ATI Rage Pro. The autodetect finds the hardware just fine, but X11 just won't start and it tries several times going through several iterations before finally giving up. This does not appear to be a bad cut of the CD or a corrupt .iso, but I suspect it's possible. I can get a console prompt but no X and, of course, no KDE. Startx (from the said console) does not do anything more than what the CD normally does (doesn't work either).

Just curious if anyone else has run into a similar problem. I'm booting the live CD version 3.8.1 that I downloaded from one of the German mirrors (it was featured on the front page of Distrowatch).

BTW, I have a ver. 3.7 knoppix Live CD that works like a charm on both machines. The Athlon machine has gentoo 2005.0 loaded, so I know X (well, xorg) works on that machine in a native build. I've also gotten Mepis, DSL, Puppy, and other distros to boot on the laptop.

I will try again when a 3.8.2 is released, of course

roofer