Hi everyone.

I have this laptop, a Compaq Presario 900z.

It has a few very obscure pieces of hardware in it, and I have been trying to get linux running on it for almost a year.

Have been checking google and the like, and barely anyone has been successful, and those who have, well their methods didnt work for me.

The errors have been due to IDE drivers, video drivers, pci drivers, sound drivers, PCMCIA drivers, USB, basiclly a whole ton of stuff.

Now I checked about every month or so, and have attempted installs myself ( I'm not a linux expert or anything, I'd guess im a bit under intermediate ).

Well the other day I was toting around a knoppix CD ( latest release ) that was unlabeled, I had made it to help a friend who had accidently locked himself out of his windows machine ( for those who don't know, you can boot with knoppix and get the password hashes from a windows machine fairly easily ). I just threw it in my laptop bag when I got finished helping him, and thought nothing of it.

Later on I went to grab my music CD at my bag to listen to some Rammstein while I was messing around at the wireless cafe. I hit the power on to my laptop, put the CD in, typed in the bios password and went to get a drink while it was booting.

Well it wasnt the rammstein CD.

The heathen laptop that could not support any other distrobution even heavily tweaked ( im talking recompiled kernels, new drivers and modules made from scratch, heavily tweaked ) had just booted Knoppix.

with no configuration at all.

Even more to my surprise X and sound both worked. Sound was something that I don't believe anyone ( that posted on the forums/sites that I checked ) had gotten to work on this laptop yet.


Now Debian is the one distro that I never tested.

What I'm wondering is:

If knoppix works, does that mean debian will work?

It's going to be a pretty long, involved process getting debian and whatnot, as I'm on a slow internet connection now, and will have to back up a ton of data on my laptops hard drive.

I know that knoppix is based on debian, but just how similar are they?

Also I have some questions about a knoppix install to HD. I know there are guides on it, I know how to RTFM. I am not asking how to do it.

What I want to know is it as effective performance-wise, and versitility-wise ( versitility in terms of preinstalled software packages, this isnt as big of a deal as I can just install the software I need ) as a full fledged debian install?

I am VERY happy with what I've just seen Knoppix do.

Seeing that computer boot linux was like seeing the virgin mary or something, I never thought I'd ever see it happen.