I have had terrible trouble with 7.4.2 and 8.1.0 on a Dell XPS9360. Whether booting from the KNOPPIX DVD (burn iso) or from a boot USB (I use Pendrive's Universal-USB-Installer v. 1.9.8.0, there may be other or later versions) all I got was a blank screen. But a certain amount of whirring suggested to me that the live version was in fact progressing and available. After a lot of messing about with vga=xxx in the KERNEL stanza in /boot/isolinux/isolinux.cfg I iterated to the best, sparsest and most portable version of this configuration file that I have EVER had. It reads
DEFAULT console
TIMEOUT 40
PROMPT 1
LABEL console
KERNEL linux
APPEND initrd=minirt.gz vga=893 lang=uk 1
LABEL video
KERNEL linux
APPEND initrd=minirt.gz vga=893 lang=uk #
By portable I mean this works on an ancient (really ancient) Samsung, any number of Dells in all configurations / ages, likewise Fujitsus. All screens from 800x600 to 1920x1080.
Still can't get 8.1.0 to work using a boot USB (DVD is fine). The architecture dictated by Pendrive leads to a configuration location error ("Can't find ..") from the very start. Even mimicking the geography of the 7.4.2 boot USB does not mend this.
Fergus
Custom Server 15" Depth X11SSH-F E3-1270 V6 3.8Ghz 4 Core - 128GB NVME 32GB RAM
$399.00
1U BareMetal pfsense opnsense Router Firewall DNS Server 6x 10GB Ethernet Ports
$149.00
POGO Linux WEBWARE 1150 Rack-Mount Server Pentium 4 2.8GHz 512MB - No Drives
$179.99
IBM Power8 S822L 20-Core 3.42GHz 256Gb 1.2Tb 40G Elastic Storage Server 5148-22L
$599.95
1U 10 SFF Bay Supermicro Server X10DRW-iT 2x Xeon E5-2690 V4 128GB DDR4 RAM
$399.00
1U Server 15" Depth X11SSH-F E3-1270 V6 3.8Ghz 4 Core 32GB RAM 240G SSD
$320.00
PFSENSE 15" Depth Server Router Firewall Supermicro X11SSH-F E3-1240 V5 32GB RAM
$382.00
IBM 8247-21L S812L 10-core 3.42 GHz 128GB 2x 300gb 12x SFF Power8 Linux Server
$649.00
SQL Server 2022 Standard Unlimited Cores
$510.93
VPS Windows / Linux Server - 12GB RAM, 4 Core, 1 TB HD, Unltd. bandwidth 1 Year
$280.48