newb can't boot live slack
 

hi...new linux explorer here. i was told to call myself that rather than n00b on another board. it doesn't really matter what anyone wants to call me tho. i'll answer to just about anything. i do try to respect others sensitivities tho. anyways, i'm exploring all the live cd's but i have a prob with one. i can't get any slack based live cd to boot. which brings me here. they freeze up. i can get vector booted but not slackware, slax, ultima, zenwalk, looking glass, etc. i've tried these on 2 machines. a new, fast and big machine and an old, slow and small machine. do i have 2 incompatible computers or is there something i can do before starting the boot? i surely would like to see what a slack distro looks and feels like. i searched here but didn't find anything about this. also i am pretty new so please don't respond with anything too technical. thanks.

u havent mentioned ur error messages, they all r bootable tht why the name live cd.

list the errors u receive..i use slax and it is working smoothly everywhere
slackware is no live by itself as far i know, but slax is fully slack regards

I thingk that what you call a live CD is a installer. Fisrt try to meke sure that your BIOS settings in your motherboard are configured to boot first from the CD Drive, then the Hard Drive. If they are correct, you can put the Slack Install CD and follow the screens.
If it's not working, then try to download and burn a new ISO image from slackware, or even better buy it from the website to support the project.

Edgar

thanks for the replies...my apologies, slackware is an install cd. i do not wish to install that just now on this machine. ok, i tried slax again to refresh my memory. i'm trying slax 5.0.7 standard. the md5 is ok and i even downloaded another iso and burned it in case the first cd was a bad burn. it does boot up to a certain point and then freezes depending on what cheatcode i've tried. i have tried many of the cheatcodes in various combinations. copy2ram, nohd, nohotplug, nosound, autoexec=startx, etc, etc. each one freezes at a different point. at one point i am able to get a login screen but when i try to start X i get the desktop background but the cursor is frozen. it just won't run. i have to manually power off each time. i'm trying this on an hp pavilion a450n desktop pc p4 hyper-threading 3ghz cpu, 1gb ram, with a dual boot configuration windowsXP and mandriva 2006. also nvidia fx5200 card. it does seem to boot past the dhcp configuration so my nic card is ok. i'm getting various errors depending on the boot parameter, bad EIP value or bad font path or just some hexadecimal memory code. i guess something on this machine is just plain incompatible. any suggestions are surely welcome and thanks for looking at this.

the best way is to use a re writable cd ;),
first try without cheat codes, at the #prompt try xorgsetup and try startx, if it fails, it is ur grphix card problem

slax is a minimal live cd. (it is ment for tweeking and lerning like slackware) so it wont have all u need but u can add it.
so there u r.
the problem is with ur graphics card.
you could try it without graphix, only text mode. dotn try startx
i dont know wether the slax is shipped with nvidia graphix module by default.
if not u have to download the slax modules corresponding to NVIDIA grphix driver from their site.

put the module in it, create a new iso
in their site it is mentioned how to add ur modules
or make ur own kernel and put in it hi :)
burn it log into slax without x, text mode, then at the prompt
type #xorgsetup
tehn startx

what about knoppix ?