Where is the best guide to solving hardware compatibility

**christophermbalz** · 03-06-2008, 01:37 AM

After a Symantec "upgrade" marooned my retiree parents for almost two years, I'd like to help them and their neighbors with an alternative. But so far, no luck on HP Pavilion. I've seen the tips for hardware compatibility on this site and others, read the relevant sections of the O'Reilly book on Knoppix, but feel that the problem requires a much bigger index or guide.

So as not to reinvent the wheel, is there anything like that available?

Thank you in advance!

**Harry Kuhman** · 03-06-2008, 01:51 AM

Knoppix is a live CD. It's pretty "compatible" with a lot of hardware, but that sometimes involves finding the right "cheat codes" to tpye in a boot time. It's far from the best for making an installed Linux system though. While there are many different Linux distros, if you like Knoppix and want something similar, I would suggest trying to install Debian (testing version). You likely will not hit any compatibility problems, but if you do the Debian support forum should be able to walk yu through them. Other Linux distros that I know of having pretty good hardware compatibility include Ubuntu and Mandirva. You could try either of these if you hit an issue that you can't resolve with Debian.

**christophermbalz** · 03-06-2008, 06:20 AM

Thank you! Since partitioning the hard drive is a little too technical for my folks and their retiree friends, and since they have a lot of their data on Windows, my thought is to give them a LiveCD (as a bare CD or as an ISO image on a DVD), leaving their disk intact. My hope is to find a more extensive guide to the hardware incompatibilities than I've seen thus far.

I'd like to find the ways to get Knoppix or similar to run well without requiring the end user to experiment with cheat codes. That means the cheat-code experimentation will have to be done beforehand. So far, I wish I understood more about what is going on at the hardware level that is causing these incompatibilities, so I could move through the cheat code experimentation more quickly. Any ideas?