When trying to run 8.5 live CD it never gets past"waiting for /dev to be fully populated" cursor blinks over where {ok} should appear and then machine is hung. I then have to pull power cord and do hard reset. Any suggestions?

Howdy and Welcome seabat. Can you tell us about your laptop specs/model so we can figure out what is going on.

Hello Seabat and Welcome to Antix:
I had a lot of problems booting up 8.5 livecd on a very old Dell Inspiron. It would just hang like yours. Finally fixed it by typing nodma in the boot line. Maybe it will work for you. Then I was able to install and didn't need the nodma boot anymore.

Good luck.
Pedro

I am running an HP Vectra VL420MT with a Pentium 4 @ 1.594GHz. L1 8K L2 256K Mem 512M Chipset i845 ECC Disables FSB 99MHz. I have 2 HDD (Pri 19GB Sec 12GB). My first attempt was to load full MEPIS but wasn't successful. I then tried AntiX thinking maybe a leaner OS might run but was unsuccessful also.

It isn't because of the 'power' of you computer but it may be hardware related. Try booting the live cd, go to antiX extra options in GRUB's menu and explore them. Maybe you find the cheatcode needed for it to boot fine.

Also check that the cd is clean, md5sums match, use cdr as cdrw sometimes fail and burn at slow speed x4.

Iam trying to install antix 8.5 (686) from a ''live CD'', but hangs-up after: (hdc: DMA interrupt recovery
Total Memory available: 123336kB, Memory free: 100292kB)
Laptop: Dell Latitude, Pentium III 128MB of memory. Before burning the CD I checked the ''checksum''

Try with parameters nodma or noapic or pci=noacpi or acpi=off at boot time (just type them) or a combination of them. Or explore the 'extra options' in the live-cd menu.
If you can, open the laptop and check if the cables are well set too.