I'm trying to install Red Hat 8.0 on an old Sony Vaio N505VX notebook with Eagletec LE100BTX3 LAN PC Card. There is no CD-ROM available. A relative newbie, I thought the installation would go smoothly as I had installed RH8 on a desktop without hiccups. I was dead wrong. I spent hours trying to get it installed, to the point where I was attempting to create a driver disk using Doug Ledford's Disk Development Kit. I couldn't get the kit working and just gave up.

Can anyone offer some guidance on how to get the card working so I can do an NFS install? There are Linux drivers available from the manufacturer's site (eagletec.net) and I compiled them on the desktop. Unfortunately, I had no idea how to load them into the notebook, hence all the driver disk stuff.

Also, the reason for such an old version of RH is because we are testing some software for backwards compatibility. Though I have a feeling installing Fedora Core 2 would have saved some hair.

Any input appreciated, thanks.

Just to add a little more info. I did use the pcmcia and pcmciadd boot disks (even bootnet.img) but the card was not detected. "Hard Drive" was the only media that was on the list of sources to install from.

Also, I'm pretty sure the card is not malfunctioning since it has worked fine under Windows 98.

Nobody has a suggestion? Am I missing something obvious?

Edit: oh well, I guess there was no real solution. Ended up getting an external CD-ROM as a workaround.