Hi HalVaughan,

I agree with your sentiment with respect to Knoppix vs. Debian hardware detection - at this stage Knoppix has definitely outperformed any other distro I've seen in relation to that. I'm not sure however your problem with your Radeon would be that hard to overcome in your Debian config.

I'm not sure what you've tried - but here's what I'd do;

- Try the /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 that your Knoppix generates on your Debian box. While I don't know what kind of problem you're having, if it only relates to X configuration (which Knoppix is clever at sorting out for itself), then this may be a nice blanket solution.

- Check the output of `dmesg` while booted into your Debian distro. This may provide some clues as to whether the Radeon card itself is understood by the kernel you're running. If not, you may want to recompile your kernel using Knoppix's config, since it obviously works. Here's how:

<blockquote>

- Get the latest kernel source, which happens to be linux-2.4.20.tar.gz

- Untar it:

tar zxvf linux-2.4.20.tar.gz

- Get the config file for your Knoppix distro kernel (mine is /boot/config-2.4.19-xfs)

- Put it in the source tree you've created by untarring the kernel source as .config (linux-2.4.20/.config)

- As root, install Debian's kernel-package tools (awesome): `apt-get install kernel-package`

- As root, recompile your kernel using the config Knoppix has been using:

cd linux-2.4.20/
make-kpkg --arch-in-name --revision Hal1 kernel_image

- Now install your new kernel:

cd ..
dpkg -i kernel-image_2.4.20-Hal1_i386.deb (or similar)

- Your bootloader Lilo should take care of configuring your backup (old) kernel in case something goes wrong with this one, but make sure somewhere in your /etc/lilo.conf there's a line that just says `prompt` without a hash (#) character in front of it - this will ensure it asks you which kernel to use before booting.

If you had to change lilo.conf, be sure to run `lilo` as root to update your MBR.

- So now reboot, and see what happens ;)

</blockquote>

To actually answer your question about what Debian and Knoppix do differently, it's just different software which performs the [auto]configuration steps. Perhaps in light of its success rate, the Debian maintainers should consider switching to the package Knoppix uses, or offer it as an alternative (which they may already do).

Cheers,

- Andrew
andrew (at) solutionsfirst.com.au