A friend of mine at work was telling me about his MythTV box. I knew he didn't know ANYTHING about linux so I asked how he did it. He told me about Knoppmyth.

So I pulled my old AMD K7 700Mhz out of the closet. It was running on an old compaq board with a plextor cdrom and a rivia TNT 2 ultra. W/ an old 3DF/X TV/FM Tuner.

I was able to install R5A26 and then later R5A30 to it just fine.

As you can imagine those system stats are pretty bad so the quality was horrible.

This morning I took an AMD Duron 1.6Ghz w/ the same TV turner card and now a Geforce 256 Video card.

I was not able to install on this, every other install boot would fail somewhere different every time and if I did make it past formating, it would only copy over 3-7% and then just stop, CD rom would spin down and nothing happened.

I search the forums and tried all the extra commands to pass at boot such as knoppmyth vga=normal. Doing this produced no better results however.

So I even took my old video card the TNT Ultra and put it in the new system..same issue occured.

Finaly I started stepping back in released versions of Knoppmyth. Eventually after going back to R5A16 I was able to do a complete install.

Can anyone think of any reason why this is the only release that will install on this system yet the older system seems to do all of them?

Ok well I take back most of that (the part about this working atleast) After install completed for the first time in 8 hours now w/ the older release.. Reboot brought me to a black screen that just sat that.

So ok fine, I did an auto install yet again and this time during install I got a bunch of errors and an "install failed" msg.

So I deleted all the partions and booted back up to the install CD.
Installtion went through fine with no errors for the 2nd time now.

So now it reboots to the X loggin screen. No matter what acct u try to log in with it kicks back to the terminal then kicks right back to the login screen and does nothing else.. I don't get any of this.

Sounds like a bad burn on the CD or an incompatibility between the burner and the reader. Try booting the CD with the "testcd" option which should tell you if that's the problem.

CD tested fine.

I reinstalled again with the video card from the other system that all versions installed fine on yesterday. This time X didnt even started, just booted to terminal loggin and that was it.

This PC has a faster CPU, better mobo, better memory..yet can only installed R5A16 but thats it, can install it but not boot it. Any other version won't even install on it.

For an older nvidia chipset, you probably need an older version of the drivers.

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cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

Ooo... Good catch Cecil! Run the install-nvidia-6629-debian.sh script which Cecil included for exactly this reason, and make sure to get rid of the symlinks to the script that reinstalls 7174. As root:

The script should do it, no need to rm -fr.

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cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

But wouldnt the fact that all the versions installed on this nvidia chipset flawlessly when the card is in the other system shoot that theory down?

Sorry, I was thinking of the 8174 stuff... Where I mechanically generated the the script from the 7174 one...

No, I know this from experience.

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cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

Well that looked like it was going to work..Booted into X and wanted to continue setup then started flashing back from terminal to xloggin again.

I don't get how the card installes during a manual install in the other system just fine, it shows it downloads and puts in the correct drivers..ect but then put the SAME card in this faster system and theres nothing but problems?

You obviously haven't been doing this for long enough. Different hardware detection and reporting by the BIOS, different APIC setup, ... any number of ways that a dumber system can end up with working defaults and a half smart system can get it wrong.

Ok well I got too upset so I started to install Windows XP and was going to try Beyond TV or SageTV. I figured the drivers for my tv turner would not be there (very very old) But I figured what the hell.

Installing Xp and the install kept messing up.. I was like what the hell this sys was fine.

Finaly after eliminating many things I moved the memory to a diff dim slot.. and boom worked..
SO I tried Knoppmyth again and presto..EVERYTHING worked fine off an auto install!!!!