Hi all,

Well, first a bit of introduction;
A long time ago, I got myself a laptop. A Toshiba Satellite 4090 no less I replaced the 5 GB HDD with a 30 GB one, and upgraded its memory from 64 to 192 megabytes. However, its still a Celeron 400, so Windows XP ran like cr*p on it. In fact, I was supprised it ran at all.

Lately i've discovered the wonderful and magical world of Linux and after trying a lot of distro's, and after a lot of trial and error, I managed to get Gentoo Linux running on my main PC. (from stage 1, I might add )

However, since i'm going back to school soon (next week) and they have a reallly cool wireless network there, I decided to put the penguin in my laptop to get some more reasonable performance out of it. I first did a HD install of Knoppix, which ran pretty well. However, I recently came accross BeatrIX, a new Linux Live-cd, which claims to run well on any PC build in the last 10 years. I gave it a try and, indeed, it was pretty fast. HOWEVER, and this is where my question comes in, I couldn't get the screen to any resolution other than 640x480, while Knoppix works perfectly @ 1024x768.

According to Knoppix, the VGA controller is a Trident Cyber 9525

Is there anything I can do to get BeatrIX to work with my videocard/monitor, without first installing it to HD first?

Thanks in advance!

Just in case anyone else having the same problem finds this thread, I figured it out. I used the boot command 'fb1024x768' to start BeatrIX, and then it worked fine.

In case anyone else is interested in doing a BeatrIX HD install, I did experience a few difficulties along the way. When it tried to format the partition I specified, something must have gone wrong because at the very end of the script, it gave me some kind of partition creation error. I decided to reboot to see if it worked regardless, but GRUB came up and displayed an error (error 17, if I recall correctly) and I couldn't boot any of my OS's. I ended up doing the partitioning myself with PQmagic8 (ext2).

After that, installing to HD went fine and it booted OK. However, when I wanted to do something that required me to be SU, I discovered it didn't respond to the password I specified during the installation. I was able to correct this, however, by doing 'sudo passwd root' and changing it to what it was supposed to be.

Now that that's done with, it works perfectly. I'm even posting this from it. I never imagined I could get my crappy old laptop to run so quickly as it does now. A big recommendation to anyone who wants to revive an old machine!

Now i'm just hoping it'll work with my new WLAN PCMCIA card, which should arrive next week...

Any comments on all of this are welcome