>> Because obviously it seems to be really painful for people to try to cram
>> in all the PCMCIA tools on a initrd disk on a CD. At least nobody does it:
>> it seems to expand the size of the required tools enough that both SuSE
>> and RedHat require that Linux be able to read a floppy. Which you
>> currently can't do if the floppy is connected through a PCMCIA device.
...
> So, let's look at this issue: installation from a bootable PCMCIA IDE
> device is difficult, because the most common bootable images don't
> include PCMCIA support any longer, due to space constraints.
How about bzip2 compression for the kernel and initrd?
Distributions should already be using compiler options that produce
small code. (no alignment, etc.)
One could load a bit more using the BIOS. The boot standard allows
large (2.88 MB) floppy images at least.
Since old BIOS versions can't boot off a CD-ROM anyway, the CD-ROM
boot can drop support for old hardware. While you may have an old
SCSI card in your new PC, you won't be booting from it.
(drivers for old cards can be loaded after the CD-ROM is mounted)
The CD-ROM boot can drop floppy support for obvious reasons.
> As an aside, you may think this is a show-stopper problem, but I can
> tell you that out of thousands of PCMCIA support issues (and hundreds
> of specifically installation related questions), this is the *first
> time* I can recall seeing this particular issue raised. And to answer
> one of your earlier questions, yes, I often get email from people who
> could not even get Linux installed, due to PCMCIA issues. You are
> certainly correct that it is a problem that should be addressed, but
> it has somehow managed to remain below my radar. Why? Maybe it
> reflects the relative numbers of people who encounter each type of
> problem, or their relative levels of sophistication, or some kind of
> reporting bias. I don't know. But I don't deliberately ignore
> issues.
Only a serious nerd would know to contact you, but a serious nerd also
knows enough to work around the problem with a loadlin.exe boot.
Newbies are likely to decide that Linux is just broken, then give up.
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