The message 1129155977.31359.6.camel@localhost.localdomain from Wayne Stallwood ALUGlist@digimatic.plus.com contains these words:
You are not seeing chomp errors during the Knoppix boot are you ? Some of the symptoms you describe sound like a dud CD Drive.
Ah, I was wondering about that. No1 task today is to disconnect (one at a time) the two UW SCSI drives.
The Knoppix thing sounds like X cannot talk to your graphics card, you may want to use some of the boot options to force Vesa mode (you will still have KDE but it will be a little slow).
ATI Rage 128 (AGP card) - but why can't it just use VGA like any other OS when the drivers aren't loaded?
Another very likely possibility is dud ram, Ram can go in funny ways (including being triggered by temp or just being intermittent) So my advice is to use your other box to burn a Memtest86 Boot CD and run it overnight, checking for errors in the morning.
www.memtest86.com
Thanks - yes that's been suggested too, from various directions, and will be tried.
If CD burning isn't an option you can also find Memtest on some Linux installation media as a pre installation boot option (SuSE and I think Ubuntu does this)
Ah - no, CD burning relies on the duff box - I do have an external parallel port thing which I might be able to get to work, but last time I tried it, it couldn't find the Freecom component, and reinstalling the software didn't help.
I'll look on my CoverCDs