Paul,

I just built a diskless/fanless Knoppix box and rediscovered the delay in finding the image on the CF. The fix in my case is using the "nodma" cheat code during bootup. This may be more a generic problem than specific to Knoppix. I have another machine running Ubuntu 7.10 from a hard drive. It has a CF/IDE adapter as the slave on the same IDE port. If I put a CF in the adapter, Ubuntu hangs for a little over two minutes, then boots normally. Maybe a Debian thing?

Mike