Grant R. Guenther (grant@torque.net)
Mon, 2 Feb 1998 07:24:54 -0500 (EST)
> I own a MicroSolution BackPack PD/CD Drive
>
> My notebook is an old 486 system with no CDROM Drive, neither it has any
> SCSI or PCMCIA slots.
>
> I need to install Linux onto its limited 200MB harddisk.
It is not going to be easy to install a Linux system on such a small disk.
But, it is worth trying.
> How can I get the BACKPACK CDROM to be recognised?
The CD-ROM portion is recognised by the (old) bpcd driver, and by the
pcd driver in the PARIDE suite. The PD portion requires the pf driver
from the PARIDE suite.
> Do i need to install a minimal system onto the notebook using diskettes.
> And compiled a newer kernel that support PARA-IDE modules.
Because of the small size of your disk, you might have to do this. I believe
Slackware and Debian will install very small systems. Be careful to get
a distribution that has up-to-date compiler tools, or you will have
difficulty building the 2.1 kernels. My guess is that Debian is your best
bet.
> Or there is a new Linux release which had the modules in installation disks
> which will save me lots of troubles.
PARIDE has only been available for a few weeks, it will take six months before
the distributions catch up. RedHat, however, has supported bpcd for more
than a year, and should be able to boot on your machine and detect the CD-ROM.
(If you have RHS 5.0 and it doesn't see the CD-ROM properly, I have an
upgraded boot floppy.) However, I think it will be quite difficult to install
a small RedHat system - you will have to do a custom install and eliminate
a lot of RPMs. SuSE, from Germany, also has a distribution that recognises
some of the parallel port devices.
Which ever installation you try to use, you will need to have a good
understanding of what you actually need - so it is a good idea to learn
about Linux on another machine before trying to build your miniature version.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Grant R. Guenther grant@torque.net
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- To unsubscribe, send mail to: linux-parport-request@torque.net --
-- with the single word "unsubscribe" in the body of the message. --
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Wed 30 Dec 1998 - 10:17:23 EST