The iso finally downloaded last night and I burned the image onto the CD this morning. Unfortunately I was not able to get Knoppix to load a GUI without having to pass boot options.

First, I had to use the nousb option even to get past the first stages of hardware detection. The framebuffer was also used.

This is the boot option that works to a text login.
Sadly this doesn't load X but allows a look around.

This is the boot option to get to a KDE session
If you want to use XFce or another GUI then just add that to the boot option string.

PS. Just for kicks I also used the linux26. ;)

Now this doesn't get wireless by default. So, I'm going to play around and see if it is possible. Anyone given it a try?

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It's pretty common for laptops to require boot options to run Knoppix. Framebuffer video, too. I don't think Knoppix has the latest SiS drivers, as detailed in my earlier Dualboot thread.

I think if you used the "nomce" option instead of "nousb" you could boot and still have USB.

I got wireless working but haven't played with Linux on the 3500 for a few weeks. I tried to get enough hardware information from Averatec to write some tools to adjust display brightness and use the tablet digitizer, but they wouldn't give. All we really need are a few details about how to access the digitizer hardware, it should be a form of serial port and use a driver protocol very similar to Digital Edge and Aiptek tablets. And we need display brightness control in order to get decent battery life. It's interesting to poke around on the laptop in Linux, you can get some neat information. As posted earlier, the draw from the battery at 400MHz with full screen brightness is 1.8 amps. At 1667MHz with full screen brightness the draw is 3.3 amps. I think having brightness control, or even dynamic adjustment (move the mouse, screen brightens up, after a few seconds inactivity it dims down again) would really help battery life in Linux.

Correct on all accounts.

I'll give it a try!

Do you remember what you did?

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Oh - and did you end up changing the default fonts? Webpages sucked until I changed things to the supplied bitstream fonts and added anti-aliasing. Did you do anything differently?

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I had to use the ndiswrapper module to load the wireless driver under linux. I couldn't get the Ralink driver to work, no matter how I tried.

Was this with Knoppix 3.7 or a different distro? The autodetect says there is no wireless.

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I use Suse 9.2 dual booting with Windows. I have never really figured out how to use Knoppix - I prefer Slax as my CD based distro.

I used these instructions http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/answers/286
Substituting my wireless card for the Realtek one he mentions. Worked very well - and apparently works with Knoppix as well.

I didn't get the wireless working in Knoppix, I'm pretty sure the drivers for it are not included. I used the drivers from Ralink's website and followed the instructions. There is also a sourceforge project which takes the official Ralink source and bugfixes it.

I didn't mess with fonts, I've kinda gotten used to sucky fonts on Linux I guess. Good tip there.

Good to know that the Ralink drivers really do work - my experience with them was not so good. The Ndiswrapper for the Windows driver works just fine, but I suspect native drivers are more efficient and feel less like cheating. : )