Alrighty, so I downloaded knoppix, to letyou know off hand. I have never used linux in my life before. So a freind guided me through it. When I first tryed it I would just get a black screen after the boot prompt. Then I was given some cheats, and the only one that would get me past the first thing that shows up which would be

"uncompressing linux, ok, booting kernel"

would be the cheat "failsafe" and that would bring me right up to all the funky coloured text. Once I got there there was a thing called auto configuration, it had a green loading bar, the bar would load, the blinking cursor would go the the next line. Then taht would be it. It would stop. Im not sure what I can do. Any help would be much appreciated.