Hi everyone. Have had a number of successful fixes without making a post. But this problem didn't get me any results from the archives.

I have a fairly old home computer with an AMD 1800+ 2.4Ghz processor and 768MB ram, 100GB HD.

Sometimes when booting the system, it will decompress Linux followed by:

Booting the kernel...

and it will hang right there the instant it pops up. Hard reset the system and it will boot just fine, run all day, and shutdown beautifully. May not happen again for a couple days.

Saw another post about getting into GRUB and editing the kernel line to remove 'quiet' from it and seeing if it returns any errors. Haven't tried that yet because honestly I don't know how.

Thanks in advance.

Edit: Sorry. Using Knoppix 7.0.4

It means that when the Grub boot loader appears press "e" then you can edit the kernel options (erasing the word "quiet". You may press F2 for a number of Help instructions. Pressing "b" boots the kernel.

The intent of disabling "quiet" is to be able to see what errors are shown that causes the hang up.

Well, GRUB didn't have quiet enabled. No error messages. It was getting to be more often and I found it easier just to go back to Fedora 17 when this wasn't happening. Problem somewhat solved.

Good to hear that. Under knoppix probably you only had to add kernel options (switches) at boot up. This can be easily done right at the boot loader. What bootloader you run? Under Grub 2 switches are given by editting /etc/default/grub; with Grub Legacy much easier editting at /boot/grub/menu.lst. Common options given are NOAPIC, ACPI=OFF, etc, placing it beside the "quiet" switch. If your kernel is equipped with MODESET for graphic card auto mode (resolution) setting this often causes the system to hang right the inception of X loading; this usually needs switching NOMODESET at Grub so that kernel will not contend against, rather, peacefully delivering to X the role of fixing display resolution.

A matter to share: I too had to undergo similar indigestions installing Gnu-linux in older hardware. However, without denoting anything to Knopix (this is also a fine distro), my experience had always landed me to Absolute Linux which always solved everything for backward hardware. There is also Antix for backward hardware compatibility.

Good luck.

Hope that helps a bit.