ubuntu Live CD's and the Booting Process

[Martin McCormick]

A member of this list reminded me, off list, about the existance
of Vinux. First, thank you very much. I am using the Vinux2.x
command line shell on the systems I use today and Vinux is a
great product. Unfortunately, Vinux3 is built from the same
foundation as the present ubuntu10 live CD. This is fine except
whatever weird issue on my computer causes the live CD boot to
immediately loose sanity also occurs with the Vinux disk.
Neither one ever produce any audio from the system and both make
the CDROM drive appear to be loading the contents of the CDROM
in that one hears the laser mechanism moving back and forth as
if it was successfully reading data. I actually think it is, but
the data are all being written to the wrong memory space as the
video display stops working immediately when the boot starts.

	After about 3 minutes, the drive stops. Vinux should
have welcomed the listener to orca. The live CD should allow
one to  hit Tab, then enter, listen for a bit of music and then
type Alt-F2 orca and Enter to start orca.

	If you try these steps, the CDROM drive dutifully seeks
and makes wrattling noises like it was loading more stuff, but
there is still no video or audio.

	The ubuntu8 CD plays the musical flourish that fades to
the sounds of crickets and what I did hear after trying to start
orca was a list of supported languages in those languages so
that version was making the audio work correctly.

	We brought up the CMOS setup screen on this system and
it immediately showed the roughly 1.1 GB of memory now on the
system. I don't thing there is a thing in the world wrong with
that computer except that its memory map must not match what the
present ubuntu live CD and the Vinux CD are built for. The video
display card has a DBI connector on the back in addition to the
VGA port. Maybe it has a different memory map to support
enhanced graphics. The previous owner of the computer had bought
it for playing video games on but other than that, it appears to
be just as it came from Dell. It is all very odd.