Can't run Linux on my Toshiba Satellite

I have a Toshiba Satellite A130 that cam preinstalled with Vista Ultimate. I have tried live CD's of Knoppix and Mandriva nad can not get either to boot with out turning off HW detection. Origianlly the computer would hang when the ACPI and or APM drivers would load. Once I turned off ACPI nad APM it continued only to hang on the AGP. Not much point if I can not enjoy Linux with full video card support. Here is my configuration:

Toshiba Satellite A130 w/

Intel T7200 Core 2 Duo 2Ghz
2GB PC4200 memory
100GB HD
nVidia GeForce 7600 w/ 256 MB Video Ram
DVD Multi Drive
15.4" Brightview Display
and
Windows Vista Ultimate.

I downloaded a copy of Ubuntu thoday but have not tried it.

Also, for the time being I would like to boot Linux from a enternal USB drive if I can get it to work. This computer can not boot from a USB device. I understand that I can get around this by using a boot CD that will point to the USB drive but do not know how to create the boot cd.

 

Can you post exactly what messages you're getting? That might help narrow this down.

- Trip

 

"Also, for the time being I would like to boot Linux from a enternal USB drive if I can get it to work. This computer can not boot from a USB device. I understand that I can get around this by using a boot CD that will point to the USB drive but do not know how to create the boot cd."

Ubuntu needs to be configured to run off a USB drive, and the computer booting off it must be able to boot from USB. If you want to use Linux off of a USB drive, I would recommend trying Damn Small Linux (around 50MB as opposed to 700MB).

To create a boot CD, simply download the ISO file of Ubuntu off their site, and burn it to a CD as a CD image. CD images are basically virtual CDs; the entire contents of a real-life disc in the form of one file on your computer. Pop it in your laptop and boot from it.