I just bought a Dell GX270 Optiplex, without CD drive. It has a 2.6 Ghz processor. I also bought a DVD/CD-burner asside, an LG GCC-4480B.
I also own a Dell laptop with a PIII 1.2 Ghz processor.


To summarize my problems:
- KNOPPIX 3.2 works OK on both the laptop and the desktop
- KNOXPPIX 3.3 works OK on the laptop but fails strangely on the desktop
- Windows XP Pro works OK on the desktop

I think the problems come from my DVD/CD-RW drive being incorrectly supported, or due to the kernel playing not nicely with that hardware.

Details:
The desktop machine came with XP Pro by default, and works great. I used the CD-Burner without problems in the last 2 days.

I then tried the latest knoppix, to see how it renders on this hardware, and
I've had many problems.

First, the screen is not correclty supported at boot. It's a 18" Dell flat screen and should support 1280x1024. But that's not the main problem.

My main problem is that at startup I get a lot off errors, probably coming from the DVD/CD-RW drive (or is it the memory)? The Linux boot complains about some incompressing error.

cloop: Read error at Pos xxx in file /cdrom/KNOPPIX/....
cloop error: -3 uncompressing ...

Later, I can see error messages in the dmesg output.

I/O error: dev 0b:00 sector [...]

I've put dmesg output and XFree86 output for anyone interested to see at http://www.coffeebreaks.org/knoppix/

The loading of programs takes a long time, and sometimes fails, as if reading of the CD was really slow and shaky (perhaps due to interruptions?). I remembered KNOPPIX 3.2 working much better on my laptop.

I thought it might be a bad CD. So I tried to reboot using knoppix checkcd, and it came out with a bunch of errors. Don't have the details here, but could reproduce it if necessary. I also double checked the ISO by making an md5sum. It was OK but I reburned the CD a second time using a lower speed (x24) and the problems persist.

I tried the same KNOPPIX 3.3 CD on my laptop and it booted OK. Without the cloop errors. The speed was OK as well.

The problem now definitively coming from my desktop and not the CD, I was wondering if it was KNOPPIX 3.3 on that machine or the machine alone which was problematic. So I tried Knoppix 3.2, and it works OK (appart from the display with is not fully supported, but that's another problem).

I've ran the Dell diagnostics on the memory and it's without problems. Cannot run it on the DVD/CD-RW driver as it's not a a Dell part, but it has been working OK under XP.

My guess would be that
- either the drive is incorrectly supported under the Linux kernel of KNOPPIX 3.3 (but works in the one direibuted with KNOPPIX 3.2)
- either something happens at a lower level, like interrupts, which is only triggered under KNOPPIX 3.3

Any idea on how to go further on that?