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
1U Supermicro Server 10 Bay 2x Intel Xeon 3.3Ghz 8C 128GB RAM 480GB SSD 2x 10GBE
$273.00
Dell R730xd 26 Port SFF 2x E5-2697v4 36-Cores H730 128GB Server 2x SFP 10G ENT
$490.00
Dell PowerEdge R430 3.5 1U 2x E5-2690 v3 2.6ghz 24-Cores 256gb 4x Trays 2x 550w
$359.99
Dell PowerEdge R7425 2x AMD EPYC 7251 64GB RAM H730P RAID NO HDD/OS #73
$640.00
Dell PowerEdge R630 Server 2x E5-2680 V4 = 28 Cores S130 32GB RAM NEW 480GB SSD
$208.99
Dell PowerEdge R420 Dual Intel Xeon E5-2440 v2 @1.90GHz 32GB RAM No HDD H710
$74.50
Dell PowerEdge R620 Server 2x E5-2660 v2 2.2GHz 20 Cores 256GB RAM 1x 480GB SSD
$139.99
Dell PowerEdge R620 Server - 256GB RAM, 2x8cCPU, 120Gb SSD/3x900Gb SAS, Proxmox
$320.00
Dell Poweredge R210 II Server Xeon E3-1220 v2 3.1ghz Quad Core / NoRam / 1x Tray
$69.99
DELL PowerEdge R630 8SFF Server 2x E5-2650v4 2.2GHz =24 Cores 32GB H730 4xRJ45
$240.00