Same thing happened to me uising Knoppix 3.3.  It appears that it can't determine the bus speed for some reason. If you type 'failsafe' at the Knoppix boot prompt, it hangs at the following:

calibrating APIC timer ...
..... CPU clock speed is 3056.5406 MHz.
..... host bus clock speed is 0.0000 MHz.
cpu: 0, clocks: 0, slice: 0

Interestingly enough, Knoppix 3.3 did work on my machine until I upgraded my FlashBIOS from A01 to A25 (had to update to A23, then A24, then A25) so I am convinced it is an incompatibility between Knoppix and the new BIOS.  Mandrake 9.1 encounters the same problem as Knoppix.  I am able to get Red Hat 9 to run so there are distrobutions that will run on A25 (at least one ).

If anyone has further information I would like to hear it.

EDIT: I also was able to get SUSE 8.2 to install w/o any problems so it seems more and more like the APIC defaults vary by Linux distrobution.

Message Edited by EA5150 on 10-28-2003 12:12 PM

There is a whole slew of 5150 users reporting this same problem on their boards. 

Edit:  Found the knoppix.net forums conversation:

http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4606 

Message Edited by isnoop on 10-27-2003 01:42 PM

Hello

Very simple. If you use a SMP enable kernel your Inspiron 5150 will not boot at all if you upgraded your BIOS to any of the Dell Bioses.

Make a Knoppix CD with a non SMP enabled kernel and it will work very nicely.
This is not a Knoppix problem, it happens with any kernel with smp in any distro i probe.

Bye

HP

hpmaster,

  How do you make a non SMP enabled kernal on a knoppix iso?  Is there a specific script that needs to be edited?...It too bad you can't just put a "noSMP" cheatcode in to avoid looking for an SMP motherboard at boot time.

Moustache

I saw a message on the knoppix forum by someone who edited the kernal and made a knoppix iso with SMP disabled and APIC enabled and he said it fixed the problem with knoppix hanging on his notebook.  He said he would make the iso available on gnutella but i couldnt find it by searching.  I also request a "noSMP" option from mr. knopper but I dont know if or when it will be implemented.

moustache

I found the modified iso of Knoppix 3.3 11/14/03 here: http://62.197.175.41:8080/ 

I downloaded it (slow) from windows_no_thanks server , burned it and booted it on my Dell inspiron 5150.....it works! SMP was disabled and APIC was enabled.  It recognized my hard drive , sound card and radeon 9000 graphics card.  Only thing not recognized was broadcom 4400 ethernet card (trying to find a way to intall driver from broadcom website).

Moustache

Message Edited by moustache on 11-19-2003 04:31 PM

I managed to find this ISO on the forums there.  It took 36 hours of downloading to fetch it off of some guy's home computer.  However, it was worth the wait because now I have my very own working Knoppix distro.