Here is my little success history

I have a custom computer, assembled from parts I bought separately. Its motherboard doesn't come with serial connections for mouse and keyboard, or in other words, it comes with 6 or so USB ports and thus my mouse and keyboard are USB.

Ever since I bought this computer I have been trying to get Linux installed on it, but almost all the other distros have problem with my mouse and keyboard. I have to turn on "legacy usb support" or something like that on the bios for the keyboard to work on the non-GUI inputs. After that it might be necessary to pass "nousb" as a kernel parameter.

Once I am on a Linux kernel, the behavior of my mouse and keyboard might change whether I am on a GUI environment or not, thus sometimes my mouse or keyboard work and sometimes they don't (not necessarily they both work or don't at the same time).

I had troubles with my mouse and keyboard on 10 Linux installations or more. Knoppix 3.2 was the first to get it right, but at the time I didn't know that it could run from the hard disk as easily, but at least that gave me hope.

Then I heard that the 2.6 kernel would have better USB support and I thought that would be great and could solve my problems, but after trying 3 or so distros with kernel 2.6 support (mdk 10 beta1, fedora 2 test1, ct knoppix 3.4), none of them worked as I expected, but I never dreamed on running kernel 2.6, I just wanted to have Linux installed correctly again on my machine.

Hey, the same CD on which came ct knoppix 3.4 with kernel 2.6, had knoppix with a stable 2.4 kernel, and it did configure my mouse and keyboard well, so I thought why not install it to the hard disk (as I had just learned that I could do). Problem strikes: the CD didn't came with the script/tool with which one can install knoppix to the hard disk (the latest version of the tool is called knoppix-installer).

I searched the forum a little bit after the "knoppix-installer". Then I posted asking where I would be able to download it. About 20 hours later someone posted on another topic the instructions on how to install kernel 2.6 to the HD and it had where to download the "knoppix-installer" and the infos on how to use it. Cool.

After that I messed a little bit trying to get my screen to output in 1024x768 as it was outputting 800x600. About 4 Knoppix installations to the HD were enough to get the system that I had been dreaming about for about 8 months I think.

I am Brazilian and I had to configure it to my locale, but that was easy once I learned that I could do much of it from the "control center". This is my first time using only KDE, as I always tried to use GNOME. I am enjoying KDE.

As I am not a native English speaker, bare with my English please

Thank you