[NTLUG:Discuss] Re: Discuss Digest, Vol 10, Issue 9

[severian@pobox.com]

Howdy,
   I have done this a few times.  I just used the floppy that came with 
Mandrake 9 and told it to load the CD module.  It was pretty painless.  I 
tried it with Vector and could not get it to work.  Now, I'll tell you the 
catch.  I messed with it for a few weeks trying everything I could think of 
and I could not get it to work.  Sometimes the CD drivers would appear to 
load, but not work and sometimes they would not load.  I decided to borrow 
a little newer PCMCIA CD drive from a friend and voila.  It worked the 
first time and Mandrake loaded.  You may notice I say Mandrake 9, which is 
a little old.  I did this on two laptops, one a 486 and one a Pentium 
120.  Both had 40 or 48 meg of RAM.  I got everything installed on both, 
but decided they were too slow to do what I wanted to do with them.  I have 
a Pentium II/300 laptop with 128 meg coming this week and I'll try 
again.  I am still debating between SuSE 8.2 with KDE and Mandrake 9.1 with 
Gnome.  I am leaning towards the Mandrake because Gnome is more to my 
tastes.  SuSE is nice, but their Gnome is a half-hearted attempt.  SuSE and 
KDE may be more stable, but my laptop won't have long uptimes, anyway.
Good luck,
Ralph

p.s.  RedHat 9 and FreeBSD 4.8 installed on the laptops with the PCMCIA CD. 
as well.  But, I probably would not suggest either of those.  My favorite 
word processor,  TextMaker is now available for FreeBSD and I'm downloading 
it now.  So, maybe I'll reevaluate FreeBSD on the laptop later.


In response to the welcome remarks of Chuck at 01:59 PM 10/5/03 -0500:
>This gets asked here allot, and over the past 6 months I have not seen a 
>reply
>from anyone who has got the PCMCIA cdrom to work for installation.  I had to