>>> In short, it's a mess. And it should NOT be.
>> It should not be, if RedHat (or whatever distribution you used)
>> put the ide_cs driver on their PCMCIA install disk.
> WHAT install disk?
> There is no install disk: it's all on CD-ROM.
> If you think I'm going to use a floppy to boot up an operating
> system with, you're wrong. It makes perfect sense to just boot
> up the kernel, and start installation from the CD.
> Except it doesn't work unless you can read the CD. Which you
> can't with the current PCMCIA approach.
> NOW do you see why I think a user-mode component is simply not
> acceptable for any basic functionality?
Another combination that's near enough impossible to install Linux on
is a system with one or more EIDE hard drives, but with only SCSI CD
drives. On all the distributions I've tried, this combination doesn't
even come close to working - usually, the system gets stuck in a loop
where it needs to access the CD drive to read the driver needed to
access the CD drive.
OK, one can copy the CD to a hard drive partition, but that always
presupposes that there's sufficient room to do so and still be able to
install Linux in the remaining space. Such isn't always the case.
One obvious solution, at least to this second problem, would be to
sort out the CD-ROM boot images that RedHat (and the other
distributors) use. I use RedHat myself, so will refer to that, but
these comments apply equally to the various other distributions:
1. Currently, RedHat CD's include a set of boot images in the
/images directory of their CD's, each being an image of a
1440k diskette. One of these images is bootable for doing
installations by booting from the CD.
2. On their i386 distribution, the current set of images has
two bootable images (boot.img and bootnet.img) together
with two supplemental images (modules.img and supp.img).
3. If one needs to use a boot process that requires one of the
supplemental images, one gets stuck in the above loop.
The obvious cure, at least to my way of thinking, is to additionally
include a boot image for a 2880k diskette which is the bootable image
for booting from CD, and which includes both the boot system and the
relevant initrd to deal with any form of modular startup.
Leave the 1440k images there as well, so people with older systems
that don't know how to boot from CD can still use them to install, but
for heaven's sake make the CD's boot image one that doesn't need any
supplemental files for any form of installation that boots from the CD
itself.
Best wishes from Riley.
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| There is something frustrating about the quality and speed of Linux |
| development, ie., the quality is too high and the speed is too high, |
| in other words, I can implement this XXXX feature, but I bet someone |
| else has already done so and is just about to release their patch. |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
* ftp://ftp.MemAlpha.cx/pub/rhw/Linux
* http://www.MemAlpha.cx/kernel.versions.html
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