Subj : What's the story with Knoppix?
To   : comp.os.linux
From : Linux Lover
Date : Sat Dec 18 2004 09:49 pm

I heard so many nice things about Knoppix, so when I received a Compaq 
Armada 1700 which had only a 4GB HDD, I thought the best thing for it is 
to run Knoppix on it (so that I can use most of the HDD for data instead 
of the OS).

I eagerly downloaded Knoppix 3.7 (the latest and greatest as of today), 
but when I installed it it couldn't recognized the mouse properly, thus 
the mouse cursor on screen is stuck at the center of the screen.

At first I thought perhaps Armada's touchpad is a weird non-standard 
device, so maybe it poses a problem for Knoppix. So, I connected a very 
standard Logitech PS/2 mouse to the PS/2 mouse port of this laptop - 
which did not help the problem one little bit. :-(

Of course I read the FAQ and sure enough there was a reference to such a 
problem:

"If the pointer appears in the middle of the screen and doesn't respond 
to mouse movements at all, you probably have a board with a known BIOS 
bug (lately this problem has been appearing frequently with notebooks). 
Try to type in
	knoppix pci=irqmask=0x0e98
at the boot screen and see if this helps. Alternatively, you can find a 
BIOS update for your computer (you may want to do this anyway?)."

Well, that Armada does have the latest and greatest BIOS and I did try 
the "knoppix pci=irqmask=0x0e98" cheat - to no avail. :-(

One could think Linux has a problem with this particular laptop, but 
both RedHat (RHEL 3) and Mandrake (10) have no problem whatsoever 
responding to either the touchpad or the external mouse properly.

So, I can only assume that something is fundamentaly wrong with the way 
*Knoppix* identify the pointing device (Knoppix had no problem with any 
of the other hardware devices proper detection and control).

Any idea how to solve this problem?
Or at least how to let the author of Knoppix about this serious flaw? (I 
wouldn't call it "serious flaw", if RedHat and Mandrake didn't work so 
well with the same exact hardware).

Thanks,
Lynn

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