Knoppix is great! I'm using it as a way to reacquaint myself with the linux world. My experience to date has only been on PPC hardware, so the x86 world is a little new to me.

The problem I've been having is that while booting from the CD, the screen blanks out & loses monitor synch during the boot process &/or after X11 starts up.

Hardware includes: Asus P4B533-VM, P4 1.8 (Northwood), 512MB RAM & most importantly, a Radeon 7000VE.

All my hardware seems to be detected normally. The graphics card is noted as an "ati|radeon QY, using xfree86(vesa) server"

Here's what been tried:
  • straight boot (eg. "knoppix")
    knoppix xserver=XF86_SVGA
    knoppix screen=1024x768 xmodule=radeon
    fb1024x768
All of the above showed no boot progress, no X11 console, & all other virtual consoles tried to synch the monitor, but failed.

Next:
  • failsafe
    knoppix-txt
    knoppix vga=normal
    knoppix vga=normal xserver=XF86_SVGA
All of these resulted in a visible boot sequence @ 800x600 (although tux didn't show up), however x11 failed. The other consoles worked @ 800x600. Progress was being made...

Next:
  • knoppix screen=800x600
    knoppix screen=800x600 xmodule=radeon
Again, with these I ahd no display at all as the boot happened, however x11 started up. Oddly the other consoles lost monitor synch when I switched to them. At least I had an XWindow system going with these...

Finally:
Code:
knoppix vga=normal screen=800x600
This showed the boot sequence (without tux) @ 800x600, fired up X11, and also had working virtual consoles!
Code:
fb800x600
This showed the boot sequence (with tux!) @ 1024x768, fired up X11, and also had working virtual consoles! I finally found a working cheatcode!! So I had to try one more thing...
Code:
fb800x600 xmodule=radeon
Again, the boot sequence showed (with tux) @ 1024x768, but X11 failed. Drat.

So can anyone interpret these results for me? I'm likely to try to create a fully disk-based linux solution & I'd like to sort out what is happening with the video drivers, framebuffers, etc.

Thanks,
Brad

P.S. Thank goodness knoppix boots fast!