installing on a pcmcia cdrom drive

severina · n00b Joined: 12 Nov 2002 Posts: 7

sony vaio laptop.. trying to install from the sony pcmcia cdrom drive. apparently the cd kernel doesn't have pcmcia built in from scratch so it won't mount the cd.

is there another way I can do this like install from the hard drive?

let me know.

thanks!

Michelle

Ethernal · Posted: Tue Nov 12, 2002 3:55 pm Post subject:

Hm, which install cd did you try? With the 1.2 cd stage 3 there should be ample pcmcia support, maybe just for NIC's but anyway.

Can you boot from the cd at all to start with? If so you could always manually wget the desired stage tarball directly and go on from there.
_________________
Hmm.. Of course, these are MY opinions - likely to be just as flawed as anyone else's. Um, really, I guess you should assume everyone's speaking out of some external influence. Believe in whatever makes sense to you.

severina · n00b Joined: 12 Nov 2002 Posts: 7

yes i can. i just need to get to be able to pass options to the kernel actually.. i foudn in the faq that i need to pass the standard ide2=0x180,0x386 which i have to pass to install any other distribution of linux from this cdrom.. however i can't seem to get to a 'prompt' to do that.. it just autoboots and starts loading..

is there a boot floppy maybe that i can use first to pass these options to the kernel?

Ethernal · Posted: Tue Nov 12, 2002 3:59 pm Post subject:

sounds like you're using the 1.4 live cd, try to download the 1.2 instead. since it actually lets you pass options to the kernel during boot-time.

and by the way, what sony vaio do you have? i'm considering buying a fx-801 but i'm not sure about the linux compability

_________________
Hmm.. Of course, these are MY opinions - likely to be just as flawed as anyone else's. Um, really, I guess you should assume everyone's speaking out of some external influence. Believe in whatever makes sense to you.

severina · n00b Joined: 12 Nov 2002 Posts: 7

i have a lil old one.. sony z505LS .. it's a PIII 750.

The reason i'm going to try out Gentoo is I'm a DJ and I use final scratch, but I refuse to use their super-hacked version of linux. One person that has gotten Final Scratch working on linux got it working in Gentoo. It requires devfs among other things, so I figure if i already start with a distribution that has devfs enabled, we're almost there.

I had it working on SuSE, but SuSE is a *HOG* and i was getting audio drops and all sorts of problems.

I want to start as clean and optimized as possible without any junk.

Ethernal · Posted: Tue Nov 12, 2002 4:31 pm Post subject:

well, good luck anyway, hope my confusing messages will help you in someway
_________________
Hmm.. Of course, these are MY opinions - likely to be just as flawed as anyone else's. Um, really, I guess you should assume everyone's speaking out of some external influence. Believe in whatever makes sense to you.

severina · n00b Joined: 12 Nov 2002 Posts: 7

i'm getting the 1.2 cd now. it's a shame that you can't pass kernel options in 1.4 .. why was that done? that's kinda silly..

severina · n00b Joined: 12 Nov 2002 Posts: 7

unfortunately it looks like the 1.2 cd is missing a lot. i'm gonna need to figure out how to pass commands to the kernel for the 1.4 cd.

severina · n00b Joined: 12 Nov 2002 Posts: 7

hrm. is there a way i can modify the iso to change ONE config file and re-iso it again? .. i'm not too keen on how to do that.

humpback · Posted: Wed Nov 13, 2002 1:15 am Post subject:

You can grab a Cd from other distro and use it to boot the system. Then when one of the "other" consoles starts (alt-f2) just start following the install guide.
The Gentoo install cd is just a means of booting a kernel and having a fdisk+mkfs+wget (or some away to grab a stage from another machine)+chroot .
I hope this helps

Ethernal · Posted: Wed Nov 13, 2002 8:45 am Post subject:

or you could boot with the 1.2 cd and then just use 1.4 stage tarballs
_________________
Hmm.. Of course, these are MY opinions - likely to be just as flawed as anyone else's. Um, really, I guess you should assume everyone's speaking out of some external influence. Believe in whatever makes sense to you.