Can anyone guide me with a problem that seems to be fairly common with live distros?

I've tried a few different ones to get the feel of Linux and overall I think they're a pretty impressive way to "try it before you break it".

My question regards start up options for the live distros. They all seem to support some sort of additional commands when they boot, but how do you find out what they are?

In particular at the moment, I have a dyne:bolic live CD and when I boot from it, I get a completely blank display on my Dell laptop. The boot screen says try typing "dyne vga=769" to resolve display problems, but that doesn't work. However if you change the number to something it doesn't recognise you get a prompt to "press enter to see available video modes" after which a menu appears. Unfortunately these don't work either, but my point is that there must be loads of other boot options which I could try if only I knew about them.

I am assuming that the same goes for other live distros too. Are there any common boot options available on all flavours or does each distro have it's own specific set of boot options?

Any extra info on this would be really useful.

Cheers,

Richard.

Usually pressing the f2 or f3 key will list boot options on a live cd.

With a Dell laptop you likely will want to use the boot option:

fb1024x768

Generally you will find any boot options (cheatcodes) by pressing F1, F2 etc at the boot prompt , otherwise check out distro web site eg. http://slax.linux-live.org/cheatcodes.php. They may have common cheatcodes but they probably all require prefix such as boot:slax acpi=off - boot:knoppix acpi=off but dont take that as correct for all

Thanks all.

I'll try those out.

It's often simple instructions like these that help so many, but when the developers put these things together, they tend to overlook the simple stuff and assume that everyone knows them already.