“One of the seemingly up and coming topics in the Linux world at
this time is the use of Linux on a platform other than the
conventional desktop. Laptops, PDA’s, and other portable devices
are all coming into the scope of things at a quick rate. One of the
problems with laptops is that they tend to use more “bleeding edge”
technologies, as opposed to the more widely supported desktop
platform. One such example of this rift between the laptop and
desktop platforms is the video card issue. Laptops are using
chipsets such as the NeoMagic, which was not supported in XFree
until recently. This all brings me to the entire crux of this
article. Many laptop manufacturers these days seem to be including
a plethora of ports on their machines, most of which are
well-supported (Or so M$ would have you believe) in
Windows9x/NT/2k. For example, the laptop I recently purchased, a
Sony VAIO PCG-Z505RX has three USB ports, and two FireWire
ports.”
“The Z505RX is a pretty decent system, and I’m quite happy with
it, now that I’ve got Linux working on it and all. It’s powered by
an Intel Mobile Pentium II running at 400 MHz, 128MB RAM, 8.1GB
Hard Drive, 2.5MB NeoMagic video chipset, 12.1″ LCD, and some other
assorted goodies. There are, however, two major pitfalls that I had
to overcome to install Linux on this machine. First of all, Sony
charges around $300(US) for the PCMCIA-controlled CDROM drive.
Secondly, the 505RX ships with an USB floppy drive, which is not
supported by the current production Linux Kernel, but is currently
under heavy development by Alan Cox and co. in the 2.3.x
series.”
“Considering I didn’t shell out the 300 for the CDROM module, I
found myself up a creek at first regarding just how in the heck I
was going to get Linux installed. I tried to boot it using the
standard bare.i Slackware bootdisk, but no dice. I needed a better
solution for installing Slackware that could be accomplished with
minimal pain, employing the USB floppy disk drive. Enter
ZipSlack.“