The Knoppix Live CD loads nicely, but I get this message just before the KDE desktop: "Autodetection seems to hang...check your BIOS."
Then the desktop comes up with the mouse pointer stuck in the middle of the screen. I am unable to move it. Even my keyboard is unusable.
My keyboard is USB, the mouse is a Compaq wheelmouse. My pc is a Compaq Presario 5000 5wv257, 700mhz, AMD Duron, 512 MB ram, 20 Gig hd with 7 gig free.
Do I really have a BIOS problem or is there a workaround for the keyboard/mouse?

I actually had a similar problem with the SuSE Live CD..."Sorry, no partition found, your config data will not be saved...press ok". Can't press "Ok"...my mouse don't work! Can't even hit "Enter".

Anyone have a clue? So far the only Live CD that worked was Slackware.
Thx.

i tried these 2 cheat codes at the boot prompt:
knoppix pci=irqmask=0x0e98
and
knoppix pci=bios

made no difference whatsoever.

Knoppix couldn't detect my ps/2 mouse or keyboard and i've googled everywhere for hints to no avail. So basically i gave up on Knoppix. I also gave up on SuSE live cd because of display problems...i know, you're saying i didn't look hard enough...well i just wanted to find a distro that i didn't have to jump through flaming hoops trying to get a simple mouse and keyboard to work.
Anyhow, i just installed Slackware's latest bootable cd and in less than 5 minutes i was up and online, even set up my email with KMail. Am I impressed? You bet! Anyone with hardware detection conflicts should give Slack a try. It auto-detected everything flawlessly.
http://www.slackware-live.org/
I can see a full install in the near future, methinks!