hi y'all

i got given an old sony vaio (PCG-5291) that was about to get binned and thought i'd be all clever and recycle it with a linux distro - u know just for surfing mostly

key thing here is that it needs to connect to the 'net wirelessly - and the spare PCMCIA card i have is a linksys with an Airgo pre-n chip (WPC54GX) - netain.inf driver from netgear works with ndiswrapper apparently (not that i've had the chance to find out mind you !)

anyway .... the vaio has no onboard drives ('cept hdd, natch) and uses a USB floppy and PCMCIA CD

there are 2 USB ports - but more of that later - and precious little else

so .... i tried, and failed, to install from the CD (in no particular order) - lastest ISOs unless stated

knoppix
gentoo - whooah !! when i tried that later on my spare/test desktop machine i got hopelessly lost just answering the install questions. scary
mepis
SuSE 10
ubuntu 'dapper'
PClinuxOS
damn small - i had high hopes for this as by this stage i was losing the will to live a touch !! even using the boot floppy i couldn't get it to find the ISO on the PCMCIA CD and when i went down the USB stick route it wouldn't find that either (yes i did have the correct .img in each case) - something i suspect to do with the fact that the floppy drive is already in one of the USBs

in each and every case the vaio booted off the CD, gave me a splash screen, unpacked the kernel then variously hung, panicked or killed the install process as in all cases it seemed to 'lose' the CD

i haven't yet tried to install Win98 and do a 'poormans' install of DSL off the hdd but that is a last resort - although the way it's been going i'm sure that'll fall over too !!

thus far i've also avoided debian or slackware - which given my abject falure with gentoo may well be a wise move !
what i'm really after here are nice straightforward installs which find all the hardware on their own and only want to know my name and a couple of passwords

any of you gurus out there got any advice for this relative

thanks as always

neill

personally, i think it would be one of three things:

1 - CD
probably not, but its worth asking. would you happen to be using a CD-RW and using the same CD to burn? either way, get a nice new CD, burn the image at the lowest speed to ensure the most accurate write.

2 - image download
if you have not, verify the integrity of your downloads by checking the key / md5 sum from the official site. also, if you didnt already, make sure to download the files only from official resources where the files will be valid.

3 - hard disk
probably not either, but.. does your hard drive make noises at you, that seem it probably shouldnt? does the disk have an OS installed already? either way, use a tool or download one to check your disk for errors.
for DSL, try booting with the 'toram' option to load the OS completely into RAM and see how that goes. if that works then maybe it IS your hard drive.

let us know

I searched for your type of computer & found an OpenBSD'ler with the same problem - not being able to install .

: http://archives.neohapsis.com/archiv...6-05/1432.html

Solution : disable PnP it seems

hi

the CDs are good - insofar as at least 2 of them ave been used to install onto desktop systems

that PnP issue sounds intetesting - i'll have a go at that toonight and report back

thanks

neill

OK update time

to the previous list of failed PCMCIA installations now please add:

Feather linux (CD and USB - the latter using either .img)
CentOS
Kanotix (getting esoteric now !)
Vector - although as with DSL i haven't tried installing out of another OS (chance would be a fine thing !)

am downloading mandriva 1 as we speak but am holding out no great hopes

this is actually getting a bit bl**dy irritating - is there something technical about PCMCIA that makes it hard to implement ??



neill

Just a possibility, but the pc card CD player. Does it have a switch on the bottom? I have 2 Vaios from work that have the internal drive lack that you describe. One of them (PCG-Z505SX) works just fine with the switch in either position, but the other, a PCG-CX1 requires the switch in a particular position or it loses the CD drive. I don't have it with me right now so I am not sure of the name of the position, but I seem to remember it was named something like setup?? Anyway, if your drive has such a switch, move it to the other position and try that. I really hope this helps, because it sounds like you've gone through way too much aggravation already.

babaysnake what exactly did you do ?

What is a failed PCMCIA installation ?

Did you disable Plug and Play support ?

Or did you only disable PCMCIA ?

How ?

What happened etc - well your feedback is rather vague so there is a chance that you missed something etc ... or to be direct .. you havent got a clue what you are doing & throwing in one CD after another expecting success - if it is a kernel issue then each & every distro will fail at some point because it always is the Linux kernel .

It seems to be a hardware problem so you must tell the kernel to avoid the hardware by passing boot parameters to it IMO .

?

you're absolutely right of course - i needed to pass some arguments to the kernel at boot time

as i recall it turns out ide2=0x180,0x386 was what was required

once i discovered that then i found myself able to load a number of distros - vector, DSL, feather, knoppix


however, interestingly i ended up with xubuntu 6.06, despite not being able to load ubuntu 6.06

i found that xubuntu would load off the PCMCIA drive both with and without the boot arguments, but ubuntu only with the arguments (and then it stalled late on in the install - i'm guessing due to memeory issues)

which leads me to ask the following - what is it about the xubuntu install routine that is so different from all the other distros i tried in a way that enables it to load off the PCMCIA drive ??

it's clearly tecnically possible to set the distros up to load readily this way - why do only the xubuntu engineers seem to have implemented it ??

and BTW i'm delighted with xubuntu - my little old vaio is fast and responsive in a way it never could be with windows, and my wireless card works out of the box with the madwifi driver

thanks for the input

FINALLY - Cool - Great - the machine is operating 8)

I have to check out xubuntu although I hate Ubuntu I have to admit .