I acquired an older home-built PC from a friend. The Mobo is a DFI K6BV3+/66 with an AMD K6-2/500. 196mb ram. Whenever I try to load a live cd (Knoppix, Suse Live, Slax, Slackware Live) I get the normat startup screen (ie, where I type 'knoppix lang=us', etc). Then when it starts loading, the screen gets all scrambled. In Knoppix, the small Tux logo, which should be in the upper left corner, is spread all the way across the screen in little lines/pieces. The text messages are also smeared across the screen.

Slax did the same, but it got past this. I could see where KDE started. But the wallpaper was 'doubled'. The image which should be in the center of the wallpaper appears twice on the screen.

I tried 2 different vidcards (one agp, one pci) with the same results. I also tried telling knoppix different screen resolutions, refresh rates. I cleared the BIOS and set to default settings.

I have never seen these symptoms, and I have used these live distros on PC's as old as Pentium 166's with no trouble at all. Anyone ever seen this?

yes! it was a faulty memory module in my case, when i was running suse-live cd

Maybe that's my problem. About an hour ago I booted with SystemRescue cd and started memtest. I will check it in the morning. We shall see...

Well, no errors in memtest. It was on it's 14th pass when I got up today.

Also, I have googled for Linux problems with the AMD k6 cpus, and I found lots of sites that state that these are pretty solid.

Maybe there is an issue with the motherboard/chipset. I have never used a DFI board.

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