[Techtalk] "I need to use Windows because ..."

[Akkana]

> > It's odd you mention that Mandrake
> > is problem on laptops, it has been the best for me on the Fujitsu laptop I
> > have.

Dave North writes:
> I think one of the keys is how your pcmcia works, and another is whether
> you have access to a floppy/cd/nework simultaneously.

Oh, that's a problem on all distros, as far as I can tell.
I just installed Redhat 7.3 on my laptop; one of Redhat's quirks is
that if you don't configure networking at install time, it's extremely
difficult to add it later.  But the installer doesn't let you configure
networking if you don't have an ethernet card plugged in right then,
which I can't because I only have one pcmcia slot and it's busy running
the installer CD (this is a mini-laptop so the CD drive is external).

I've spent 3-4 hours fighting it so far; I briefly had networking going,
but then I tried inserting a wireless lan card and it horked things
so that now the normal lan card won't work either (it sets up as eth1
instead of eth0, and eth0 is this ghost that redhat-config-nework
doesn't see but which prevents any other network interface from working.

Other distros have other pcmcia problems, e.g. Mandrake and Debian
don't enable pcmcia in the installer kernel, so you can boot off the
CD, get into the installer, and oops! now it doesn't see the CD any
more.

Blah.

	...Akkana