newbie having trouble booting up on old machine

[AcEtOkE]

I'm having troubles running Knoppix on an old 350Mhz P2 machine with 192 MB RAM, 8 MB vid card and 8 GB harddrive. I put in the knoppix disk and it seems to be ok until it gives me this error: ACPI: Unable to locate RSDP. It continues to boot up after that. However it just flickers to a black screen and I can hear it load up because it says, "Launching Knoppix" or whatever it says when it boots up. It's not the disk because I ran it on my new machine and it worked fine. I wanted to use the old machine for linux and fool around and experiment with it. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanx

[Stephen]

I'm having troubles running Knoppix on an old 350Mhz P2 machine with 192 MB RAM, 8 MB vid card and 8 GB harddrive. I put in the knoppix disk and it seems to be ok until it gives me this error: ACPI: Unable to locate RSDP. It continues to boot up after that. However it just flickers to a black screen and I can hear it load up because it says, "Launching Knoppix" or whatever it says when it boots up. It's not the disk because I ran it on my new machine and it worked fine. I wanted to use the old machine for linux and fool around and experiment with it. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanx

Try booting with knoppix noacpi noddc xvrefresh=60 xmodule=?? replace the ?? with the module for the video card in the machine a list of cheat codes, you just type the line in at the Knoppix screen that first appears and then enter.

[AcEtOkE]

Hey that did the trick but i was wondering why that worked? What was the problem with it? Just trying to learn as much as i can. THankx for the reply.

[Stephen]

Hey that did the trick but i was wondering why that worked? What was the problem with it? Just trying to learn as much as i can. THankx for the reply.

Well when the screen starts to act funny then it is usually a refresh rate problem (xvrefresh=60) and the black screen is also a problem with the auto detection of the monitor (noddc stops the detection) you are on old hardware so knoppix is trying to use too high a refresh rate with the screen size and the monitor cannot handle it. The noacpi stops the detection of acpi, one of the power saving methods and probably not supported by your MB. The xmodule= I threw in because it was already having problems so you may as well tell it what to use for the video card module just to be sure it would get it right.

[Sanny]

ok i am having the exact same thing going on with me and the black screen. this may sound stupid,, but here we go what is a module and how would u find out which one to use?