All right, I burned the knoppix .iso file to a CD-RW and i booted up my computer w/ the CD in the drive, but it just booted into Windows. Does it have to be a CD-R? or am i just doing something wrong? and yes, i did burn it as an image.

1. Has to be a CD-R

2. Has to be burned "as an image", not just as data.

For a Nero Guide: linuxiso.org

For Roxio: Just double click the ISO and dont change any of the settings.

Are your BIOS settings allowing you to boot from CD? If so, then it may be a bad down load if you really burnt the ISO file as an image.

How To Check MD5sums On A Linux Iso Image
# Cheap CDs
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ComputerHelperGuy

I just noticed. Sometimes CD-RW are pretty flaky in my experience. Toss them away and get CD-R. They are cheap enough that you actually save money (time) using them.

k, i'll just burn it to a CD-R quick and see if that works. And yeah, they are cheap, i got mine for 2 cents each!

no, it didn't work, but maybe it's because i just copied the CD-RW that i burned. I'm just going to download it again and try burning it to a CD-R right away. i'll check the checksum too.

ok, i have it working, so does anybody know how long it's supposed to take for KNOPPIX to load?

Depends on your machine specs and spin rate of your cdrom drive ... I loaded it on an older 450Mhz PIII and it loaded the gui in about a two and a half minutes.

there must be something wrong w/ my comp. then, cause it's been like 20 minutes and it's still not up

it's just been sitting at a blank screen for that long, and i don't know what to do. does anybody have any idea why it would be doing this for so long?

Sorry. It cannot take that long!!

Try this.
At bootup you first get a prompt. Type
knoppix 2
and enter.

You will end up at a prompt at a CLI.

Type
startx

what version of Knoppix have you been using?

i'm using version 3.2, and when i typed knoppix 2, it just started booting up and said a lot of things couldn't be found and then just stopped after a while.

but when i booted up, it said version-2.78 knoppix booting...
so i don't know which one it is. it's the newest version available though. i said it was on there on 06-06-03.

Oops!
If it says it cannot detect your hardware and giving a different version, there is something wrong with the download or you are having unusual hardware (unlikely?)

I am afraid you will have to download knoppix again and use the checksum files to check on the iso (the site gives howto).

If you are fedup with downloading this again try to get one from someone in town who Has a working version.

If not go to the Morphix (morphix.sourceforge.net) site and download one of many scaled down knoppix versions which are half the size of the knoppix.

hth

i ran the checksum file for it and it said it was ok before i burned it. maybe it's just too new of a version for my computer.