[SATLUG] Debian 4.0 install on Sony Z505 laptop with a pcmcia CDROM drive

[John Ziriax]

I've had a bit of success here and I thought I'd tell about it.

I've have  two Sony Z505 laptops that I play with now and again. I
replaced the 12 GB HD in one with a 40GB and was looking for a Linux
distro.

The problem with installing anything on these computers is that they
are small, that is to say, they have a pcmcia CDROM drive.  So, while
they will boot most distributions, they get lost when the pcmcia
driver is installed during the boot process taking out the connection
to the cdrom. Maybe some of you know a better solution to this.

The answer in the past has been a small distro like Damn Small Linux
(DSL) which boots to RAM, or a few 5.10 versions of Ubuntu which for
some reason survive the transition. Later versions do not.

Since Debian 4.0 was just released, I decided to give it a shot. I
tried the net install CD and got the same hung result when the pcmcia
driver was started. Then I got the idea to try the businesscard iso.
At 33 MB it beats the 150MB of the net install ISO and even the 50MB
of DSL.

So I gave it a shot and it seems to be working. Quite nicely I might add.

During the install some of the files failed to download possibly due
to network congestion. But with some nice report in /tmp/var/syslog
and the ability to go back, I repeated the failed steps without
restarting completely and seem to be on my way to a real Debian
install.

Here's the boot lines. These come from the many great web sites on the Z505.
For the Debian business card
install ide2=0x180,0x386 noapic nolapic vga=792

for DSL
dsl ide2=0x180,0x386 toram noapic nolapic fb1024x768 vga=792

for kubuntu 5.10
	ide2=0x180,0x386 noapic nolapic

and ubuntu 5.10 success -
	ide2=0x180,0x386


So any way it is currently retrieving file 226 of 668 estimating
between 1 and 4 hours.

I'll keep you posted.
-- 
John