My apologies for being a total beginner to Knoppix and Linux. My Knoppix CD arrived in the post yesterday; this is my first experience with Linux.

I have a Toshiba TE2300 notebook with XP on the hard drive.

I do not have any trouble booting from the Knoppix CD. The boot-up always stopped when it came to loading the advance power management module, but I managed to figure out the 'knoppix noapm' cheat code and Knoppix now does boot up.

However, I cannot get the mouse or the modem to work. The pointing device on the notebook works and I have been able to browse through the applications, but if I plug in a mouse and boot up there is no response.

In the boot-up text the following message appears:

"Starting X11...[drm:drm_init] *ERROR* Cannot initialize the agpgart module.
/lib/modules/2.4.24-xfrs/kernel/drivers/char/drm/i810.o: init_module: Cannot allocate memory."

Can anyone point me in the right direction? As I said, I have no technical knowledge of Linus at this stage. Some documents to read, perhaps.

A hint message says "You may find more information in syslog or the output from dmesg." How do I locate syslog or dmesg?

Also, is Knoppix writing data onto my hard drive? If so, can I use a USB drive instead? Either way, I want to leave the hard drive alone and use a USB drive to save data. Is there a tutorial on that somewhere in the Knoppix documentation?

Thanks for your help.

Brian McMahon