Being a complete Linux novice with a compelling desire to abandon Windoze entirely, I downloaded the SuSe 9.2 LiveDVD. After trawling around numerous forums SuSe seemed to be the most suited for newbies, and the DVD seemed the best way to test the hardware before trying a full install.

I get the welcome screen followed by Loading Linux Kernel, then the screen goes blank for 20 seconds. If I have the verbose option, I then get a vast amount of scrolling text that ends with:- Kernel panic - not syncing: Out of memory and no killable processes...

I have also tried the safe nodma option as well and get the same result. Everything I've read says it can run in 128Mb, yet I've got 256Mb and still it claims to be out of memory. Can anyone please help me take that first step on the Linux road.

This kind of problem is usually a badly burnt DVD. If you DVD hasn't burnt properly, no amount of tweaking like this will get it to work properly.

Otherwise, it just might be wrongly detecting the amount of memory you have (I've heard of some BIOSes reporting double the amount of memory, but not this way around). Tip: After the kernel has loaded, you can press Scroll Lock to lock the screen, and scroll up and down with Shift+PgUp and Shift+PgDn.

You might try typing in when you boot up; this will force it to use the right amount of memory. In principle, you could start adding swap files/partitions, but that's too much hastle for a live DVD.

or give knoppix(debian based live cd) a go.

Apologies for not responding sooner, I'm Secretary of a local charity and recently most of our spare time has been refurbishing our building ready for an inspection.

0pal_t0ad; yes. I was actualy half way through downloading it when I read your post (Oooo spooky psychic stuff). Anyhow it worked. Being curious I also tried it on a 128Mb PII, sluggish but usable, and suggests that either rjlee is right about the burn, or the download was corupted. Unfortunately neither Scroll Lock nor any other control key combination would stop SuSe, so mem=256Mb was not a usable option.

Once Knoppix was running I noticed that the GUI fonts all looked a bit fuzzy whatever application was running, so I did a bit of reading around.

Would I be right in saying that fuzzy fonts is a Linux 'feature'?

Another topic, often associated with it, was 'device independance' or in Linux's case, the lack of it. Is this something that is going to be included in some future Linux release?

Finally, is my understanding right that Linux is most reliable if it's compiled on the machine your going to use it on?

Anyhow, thanks for your help: at least I've now seen Linux in the flesh as it were. I look forward to doing more with it.

Antialiased fonts are normally turned on by default, but you need quite a high resolution (in pixels per inch) for the effect to kick in. If you don't have quite enough resolution to make out the finer detail in the fonts before antialiasing, then turning it on will just make them look fuzzy, rather than smoother. You can turn off antialiasing quite easily (eg. through the KDE control centre).

Another topic, often associated with it, was 'device independance' or in Linux's case, the lack of it. Is this something that is going to be included in some future Linux release?

? Are you perhaps talking about DVI (device independant) files? These files contain typeset documents as produced by LaTeX. (And various viewer programs have an antialiasing feature).

Finally, is my understanding right that Linux is most reliable if it's compiled on the machine your going to use it on?

No. However, recompiling your kernel will give you the opportunity to configure it to match the specifications of your machine, removing support for things that you don't use and hence making it start and/or run faster. It's also an easy way to address specific reliability problems — eg. if a driver conflict is causing a crash when autodetecting a device, then you can remove the driver for the device you can't have.

i've had that problem with all the live cd's i've tried. they don't seem to detect my graphics cards properly/set the right resolution. I must admit that i never actually took the time to really try them out properly. I'd boot to them, think "euuuuurrgh!! that's disgusting!" and just reboot to my normal gentoo desktop.

*sigh* i just know i'm gonna get bashed(no pun intended) for saying this, but i don't think of them as proper OS's, rather just something you'd use to show windows only users what linux sort of looks like.

did you use md5checksums before burning the live cd. also try burning at a lower speed. this will reduce errors.

Yes and, I did.

I don't want to send any more time trying to decide which distro to use; I want to start using Linux so I've decided to give Suse up as a bad job. I've just finished wiring my pin28 switch and I'm going install Knoppix tomorrow.

Thanks all