[kn]

System: Asrock K7S8X motherboard
AMD Athlon XP2600 processor
Matrox Mystique graphics card
256MB RAM
Maxtor Hard Drive
Samsung CDRW / DVD
On board sound / LAN
Microsoft PS/2 wheel mouse
Generic IEEE 1394 Firewire card.

Hi,

I've tried booting Knoppix 3.7 Live CD and Damn Small Linux (v0.9.2, I think). Although both of these boot up ok, they crash very soon afterwards as I try to load some applications ( eg emacs / Mozilla / Gimp). Knoppix seems to crash very quickly, DSL takes a little longer ( especially if I use the "toram" boot option in DSL).
By "crash", I mean the mouse pointer / screen freezes, and the only way I can see to fix it is power cycle. I have tried Ctrl-Alt-Esc , Ctrl-Alt-F1 ... Ctrl-AltF12, Ctrl-Alt-Del - but none of these have any effect.
I have tried some cheat codes (chosen at random, since I have no idea what might be causing this), but none seem to help.

The only error message I could see was in Knoppix: "Cannot initialise agpgart module" - I guess this might be something to do with AGP port, so I tried using the "noagp" boot option, but it still crashed.

I would appreciate any suggestions on how to go about debugging this - since I desperately want to get rid of Windoze...

Thanks.