Ehh, at least the VAIO doesn't even have a parallel port.
Look at the new machines some day: they avoid connectors like the plague,
because they take a lot of space. The VAIO, for example, has a USB port,
and it's assumed that printers, mice, floppies etc are all connecting to
just that one port.
It doesn't even have a serial port, but it _does_ have a built-in modem
and a modular telephone jack connector.
Which all really makes sense when you think about it. I applaud the Sony
engineers for doing good technical choices that result in a really small
and nice laptop. And it's a nice laptop to use.
It's just horribly hard to install ;)
> Theoretically, one can install via a serial null cable using ppp.
> Currently this would have to be done by hand -- one needs to include
> pppd into the ram disk and manually start it form a virtual console
> (or change the installation program to include ppp install option).
> There would be no CPU usage issues with this, however the speed would
> be 4 times slower (15-16Kbytes/sec as opposed to 60-64Kbytes/sec for
> the parallel port).
Also, at least my goal is to make the whole install something a normal mom
& pop shop can do without having another machine, without havign to set up
bootp, without having to really do much else than just pop in a CD and do
the install. That is what we should AIM for, at least.
Rogier (or somebody) mentioned that there are other cases that are nasty,
like having a SCSI CD and ide disks. I bet there are, although I've never
seen those kinds of problems with any regular off-the-shelf kind of
hardware (I don't actually see why that combination should be a problem,
because I _have_ installed the other way around with the CD on IDE and the
disks on SCSI, and the driver issue should be the same - at least the
distributions I've tried had teh ide driver even on the scsi kernels).
And I think the other problems should also be worked at. However, right
now the only regular problem I see for installs are either (a) complete
lack of drivers (like USB, which is getting rectified) or (b) the laptop
thing. The other installation problems tend to be much more occasional:
spotty problems with certain setups rather than a _common_ problem.
Linus
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