Lol that is no problem. The way to boot to a flash drive is again under your BIOS. Go back into your BIOS. Then go under boot options. Under there you should see something like Bootable Hard Drive or something along those lines. If you have the flash drive plugged in, it will recognize it as a hard drive. It will then have them listed in the order of precedence. The top will probably be your used hard drive. What you need to do is move your flash drive into the first position.

Now making a bootable flash drive is quite easy. All you will need to do is have the ISO image and a flash drive around 1 to 2 gigs. With this you will need a bootable flash drive maker. You did say you had Linux Mint on one of your computers so you can use that. There should be an option to create a bootable flash drive or a USB startup disc. Create it and you should be on your way!

Justin

A usb install will not fix the mouse issue. If the system locks on cd it will most likely lock on usb.

See pendrivelinux.com for how to's on making live usb's but you have other issues to fix first.

I'd look to bios settings for the touch pad. See also some dell's have a goofy usb support option on some systems. I think it is legacy usb or keyboard and or mouse. Disable that. It reserves some ram to allow mouse support in dos I think until windows loads or some nonsense. Might have to change irq's on mouse pad or track pad or other resources.

It must boot to a live cd and work correctly before any attempt is made to install.

I think I'm going to just solve the problem by getting another PC as soon as I can. Any particular things I need to watch out for as being incompatible with Linux I'd appreciate the list as far as graphics cards, and hardware go. I thank you guys for trying to help me; however, I think it will take someone more knowledgeable of computer innards than I to fix whatever is wrong on that PC. I don't quite understand what you were talking about on that last comment, jefro. I have a desktop, not a laptop with touch pad.

Well my advice would be to you on this.

With buying a new computer get one with a NVidia graphics card. They are better supported with Linux then the ATI (even though I am an ATI guy lol). Also, I would personally get an AMD CPU just because you get more bang for your buck. I know there are Intel guys out there that would say otherwise but I have used both in building my computers and AMD has been nothing but good for me. RAM, if you can, try to get something that is called DDR3, it is the newest RAM but it will be well supported for a good amount of time. The hard drive I would get would be somewhere around 320GB to 500GB, that will be enough storage to last a good amount of time. Also, on the hard drive try to get one that is what is called a SATA connection. Faster speeds and great boot up times. Motherboard, well get a good one, that is really I can say.

Just letting you know I have been building computers now for two years so I have a good amount of knowledge about them. Honestly if you really want to know more, want to build your own, or even want me to build you one just head over to my website and I will give you detailed instructions. I am happy to do this for you since I know that retail businesses will try to sell the most expensive computer. Again, come on over and I will help you through the whole process and it will all be free of charge.

Justin

I second that (nVidea graphics card). nVidea has been supporting Linux with their drivers for years, albeit not open.

Also, when I bought my PC a few weeks ago, I had a DVD drive installed from Toshiba/Samsung (TSST corp) which has firmware bugs. The drive hangs when pressed. Even to the extend that the BIOS would not detect it on reboot. I had to cut the power to get the drive working again.
There is newer firmware probably, but you need to run windows to install it.

So I tossed the DVD drive and replaced it with a proper Plextor, which solved installation difficulties with CD reader retrying, IO errors and a drive that completely hangs.

I am keeping a personal list of manufacturers to avoid and I have added TSST to it. ATI was on the list already for their poor support of Linux. My opinions might not be worth anything to anybody else, tho.

In general: do not go for the cheapest but get reliable parts.

m

The BIOS on a Compaq is F10 to acess it but how does the BIOS have to do with Linux on the hardware. PS if it has a graphics card like in the PCI or AGP slot try installing with the OnBoard Graphics if it has one then switch to the card after it is installed.

Well, folks, I have found out a few things since I was here last. I have discovered that Ubuntu Linux has a bug problem with Intel graphics cards, in particular the 945/950s, which is what I have. Lots and lots of people have had the same problem I have had, but they didn't file bug reports simply because they had a frozen pc and couldn't make any kind of report, much less a bug report. There has not been a lot of people report this bug and Ubuntu hasn't fixed it. All these other people had more or less the same problem---system became completely unresponsive either at desktop or shortly thereafter. There were some workarounds given that might or might not work for me---one was to roll back the driver to 2.4, which was the last time that the intel driver worked for Ubuntu (Jaunty I believe). Another involved working in Safe Mode, which I don't want to do. If I can't use the OS as all it can be, I'd rather not do it at all.

I do have a question though---seeing my product specs, would it be worth my time and money to replace my graphics card with an nVidia Geforce card of some denomination? My Acer has nVidia GeForce, I believe 6150 with i430 and I had absolutely no problem installing Mint 8 as a dual boot with Vista Home Premium on that machine. I need to know pretty quick as I am looking at other PCs with a view to buying one that has nVidia on board already.

I have a Samsung optical drive also. But I have installed other software on that Compaq, just this week I re-installed Roxio Media 10 suite. Looks like if it were bad, it wouldn't work for other software either.

Not often I know the answer to questions on these forums, but this one I do know.
This particular compaq (I admin 2 of them, sigh) has a known issue with the on board graphics chip and part of Ubuntu.
One way around it that I know works (I'm on one of these machines right now) is to get rid of compiz, the compositing manager.
Easy to do, too!

As soon as you get to your desktop just press CTRL-ALT-F2. Don't touch the mouse, as this appears to speed up the freezing of the system. CTRL ALT F2 will take you to a terminal. Looks like DOS, essentially. It will ask you to log in, do so. At the prompt type
This removes the offending program.
But you do want some graphics, right? Once the prompt is available again, type
This makes sure you have something that will be able to display graphics. Type
Then all you need to do is ALT-F7 or ALT-F8 to get back into X or reboot and enjoy dem beans!

This is also possibly only on GNOME, so if you wanted you could try installing KDE.
Another option that should work - replace onboard graphics card with an addon one.
And on the 4th hand, you could try just disabling the compiz desktop effects, see if that fixes it for you. It seems to have some effect:
Right Click Desktop>Change Desktop Background>Visual Effects>None.

Basically, Compiz is a compositing window manager with 3D hardware-accelerated effects.

Metacity, a simple stacking window manager, doesn't use 3D.

Thank you Calzilla. I have about decided that the CD I burned for Ubuntu was defective in some way---maybe burned at too high a speed as Linux likes something more like 4X. Anyway, just out of curiosity, I used that CD to try to use Ubuntu as a live CD on my Mint 9 machine. It wouldn't boot here either. Hung up before it ever got to the desktop. That makes me think something is wrong with the CD, as I DO have Mint 9 on here.

Anyway, I solved the problem of using Linux on my Compaq by burning an ISO of Lucid Puppy Linux, which boots and runs on RAM (I had 1 Gb free on that machine). And it runs fast also. Too, I can save my sessions to either the boot CD, a USB drive or a file within Windows. I saved my last session to a blank DVD. Haven't seen if it will save my choices yet.

If I ever have Ubuntu, I'll buy the CD and not try to burn it myself. But, I am able to have Linux on that Compaq via Lucid Puppy, and it is a neat little distro that comes with many apps and I can add to it.

So, thank you all for the information and trying to help. I might still try your method, Calzilla, should I buy another Ubuntu CD and try to install on the Compaq.

Thanks everybody.