Suggestions for a LiveCD for the AW m9700...

[aaronjb]

Ok, Linux gurus, lend me your brains.. and not in a Professor Frink Sr. way :)

I'm trying to get Gentoo installed on my shiny new Arima W830-DA (which is what the AlienWare m9700 is built on), and I'm having troubles :)

Gentoo's LiveCD doesn't play nice - running it straight up results in 'events/0' spinning and consuming all of the CPU.. But running it with acpi turned off (prevents events from spinning) results in my network card not being detected - which is a bit of a pain!

So I thought I'd find another LiveCD based distro that would work so I could get through the Gentoo install and work on configuring a kernel with the right parameters to avoid ACPI spinning events and use my wired ethernet. Unfortunately I'm not having much luck!

Gnoppix (Ubuntu based) didn't play nice at all, and just failed to boot cleanly..
Knoppix 5.0.1 uses udev, which leads to modprobe consuming 99% of the CPU and not letting me kill it for some reason.
Knoppix 4.0.2 doesn't use udev, starts nicely, but has no support for the Marvell Yukon 88E8055 (sky2) drivers, and trying to use the RaLink ra2500 WiFi just hard locks the computer.

So does anyone have any suggestions of other LiveCD based systems that I can try? I've only ever really used Knoppix in the past, so it's not an area I've researched - I'm hoping one of you will be able to think of some reasonably mature LiveCDs to try..

Doesn't matter if you don't know for sure if they have sky2 support and/or do or don't use udev, ideas is all I'm looking for - unless anyone happens to know an exact answer :)


Thanks!
Aaron

[abf]

i would have said ubuntu, but seems like you tried gnoppix, thats ok. next in line is PCLinuxOS .92, its mandrake-based...but generally a really good livecd to get things kicking.

[aaronjb]

Thanks abf - the downloads for PCLinuxOS appear to have temporarily disappeared (or, to be exact - the download link on the website takes me to a directory full of md5 checksums, and no ISOs), but it did give me a link to a PCLinuxOS based LiveCD.

I'll check PCLinuxOS again tomorrow at work and give them a try - no point me downloading them now, it takes 4hrs to download a single CD ISO at home :)

Thanks for the suggestion - I'll let you know how it works out.

[abf]

my other suggestion is Kanotix. Its based on knoppix but Kano (lead developer) puts in a LOT more extra sh!t and hardware support than the generic Knoppix.

[aaronjb]

Excellent - Kanotix works perfectly so far.. Fires up, normal processor utilisation, X works, sound works, eth0 is the wired ethernet controller..

I think we have a winner :)

[bigtrouble77]

As far as gentoo goes, I only use the minimal disc. I could never get the live 2006 disc to boot.