Appendix A: Booting Knoppix

You are visiting a friend who just got the latest Knoppix CD. Excitedly, he puts it in the CD-ROM drive of his computer, boots up the PC, and a few minutes later you are both oooo-ing and ahhhing at the beautiful KDE Desktop. Life is good. After surfing the Web, writing some emails, and chatting with friends, he powers off and hands you the CD. You go home, put the CD in your PC's CD drive, power up the machine, and walk away to get a refreshing beverage from the fridge. When you get back, you look at the screen and see … nothing — nothing but a blank screen.

What happened? This same CD worked beautifully at your friend's house. To understand what might be wrong, you first need to understand how Knoppix boots.

Ideal Boot Process

Ideally, to boot Knoppix, you set your BIOS to boot from the CD-ROM, insert the Knoppix CD into your computer's CD drive, and then boot (either turn on the power or reboot the machine). After a few moments, the Knoppix splash screen displays. If you do nothing or press the Enter key, Knoppix boots using the default settings. After a few text messages go by, Knoppix displays the KDE splash screen followed shortly by the KDE Desktop.

That's what is supposed to happen, and while it sounds fairly simple, there's actually a lot more going on under the hood.