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Topic: PCMCIA Install, How do I install to a PCMCIA Card?

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roberts

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Posts: 4983
Joined: Oct. 2003

Posted: Mar. 03 2006,22:50

Much progress on this... But...
It means two floppies. Just imposible to fit all on one floppy.
I do have the basics working.

I have a pcmcia holder with a 256MB CF and floppy drive. No hard drive and no cdrom in a very old laptop.
The install is only the KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX compressed standard DSL image file.

Systems boots cleanly except...
It does add another wrinkle to how things work.
Since pcmcia is used to boot from that means cardmgr is started before the image is found which means it is impossbile to have all possible pcmcia modules for other than boot devices available, or even to start them, i.e., pcmcia wireless network cards and such.

But the work around is ...
I have found that I must boot from floppies with only pcmcia/CF installed and NOT the pcmcia wireless card. System boots up cleanly then I insert the pcmcia wireless card and wait for the beep. Then using iwconfig GUI I am off and running wireless with only pcmcia/CF.

So good news is that booting is working.
Bad news, two floppy disks required and no auto/load and go other pcmcia devices. They must be manually inserted after bootup is completed and then configured. This means that they cannot be in the backup,i.e., bootlocal.sh. It could be a saved script in the backup and then manually run.

Still I need to do some cosmetics and further testing.

BeardedJon Offline

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Posts: 6
Joined: Jan. 2006

Posted: Mar. 03 2006,23:03

Thanks. Were you speaking English? I understood "2 floppies" and that was about it. I will wait until "cosmetics and further testing" is completed than ask for a translation (aka DSL 2 Floppy PCMCIA Install for Dummies).

cRunchy

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Posts: 16
Joined: Mar. 2006

Posted: Mar. 04 2006,00:58

Hi,

This sounds exciting as I too am interested in booting my DSL from CF in PCMCIA adapter...

I am also a little lacking in Linux skills to follow what's been said so far.

Anyway a slightly different thought occured to me and I don't know if this is even applicable to Knoppix.

Is it possible to boot DSL from a floppy using DOS or hybrid software?

I'm not suggesting this is the best way but just thinking out loud....

After loads of reading around I see that Puppy Linux uses a DOS boot disk to get into USB. (I've read so much i might be getting confused between Puppy or some other???)..

I also see that it is no longer possible to get hold of the PuppyLinux PCMCIA floppy boot starter disk.

I am not sure why but I suspect because it used commercial software and had to be withdrawn???

If the boot loader just used the DOS PCMCIA drivers I am thinking of they occupy 700KB-ish but possibly could be slimmed down..

This may not be an apealing way around but it is just another potential for doing stuff.. also if it's possible to boot from a DOS app then it would make an easy way of droping it into say 'a Win98 boot choice...

However I came to DSL for the challenge and enjoyment in learning a little about Linux so any way of getting my PCMCIA card up and running and DSL booted is great to me.

==
PS:

I understand the concept of what you are saying Roberts' about not having the wireless card etc.. enabled at start..

This was the downside of this whole concept of booting into a PCMCIA HD\CF type card. It could tie up the slot.

For me personally I am happy to sacrafice any other use of the PCMCIA slot as for me it's just a learning platform.. though I can see how others may want to swap to a network card after boot.

cbagger01

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Joined: Oct. 2003

Posted: Mar. 05 2006,07:30

You don't need DOS or any other OS to boot DSL from PCMCIA.

Why?

Because the linux kernel and miniroot intial ramdisk can already be stored on a floppy disk or disks.

The problem is:

The typical DSL boot floppy does not contain the drivers for your PCMCIA card controller chip.

This means that it can't see any of your PCMCIA devices including a CF card, so the boot will fail.

One solution to get DSL on such a machine is known as a "poorman's install", and it involves booting your original OS (DOS/Win95/Win98/WinME) and copy the contents of the CD-R disk over to your C:\ drive, IE: C:\KNOPPIX\KNOPPIX

But this is not a portable solution.

If your computer has a USB port, the portable solution is DSL USB pendrive install + USB bootfloppy.

But Robert's project should solve this. It appears to be a 2 floppy disk set that contains the usual DSL bootup files AND THE PCMCIA CONTROLLER DRIVERS.

Unfortunately, when you load up the PCMCIA drivers at the very beginning of the bootup process, it caused problems later on during the KNOPPIX autodetection process because the PCMCIA drivers are already up and running and the scripts do not expect this situation.

So his "rough draft" kinda works, but the user then needs to manually set up his additional devices because of the autodetect issue.

Hopefully this explanation is both accurate and also closer to "English" as opposed to KNOPPIX boot process developer-speak.

cRunchy

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Posts: 16
Joined: Mar. 2006

Posted: Mar. 05 2006,14:48

I have setup and tried the DOS solution. It would be quite easy if not for the fact that loading DSL breaks the dos driver conectivity with the pcmcia.. therefore only a fragment is loaded and it freezes.

It probably could be done in DOS but as you say... if there is a linux solution that would be better.. partly as the DOS drivers have speed and corruption issues.

19 replies since Mar. 02 2006,18:20

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