[TriLUG] New Vista laptop needs Linux

[Steve Litt]

On Monday 15 December 2008 11:13:22 am James Jones wrote:
> All,
>
> My Christmas present came early. It is a Toshiba Satellite L305 series
> laptop. The least expensive laptop that Walmart has on sale at the
> moment ( $398 plus tax ). It is running Vista home. I wanted to see
> how well it would run on Knoppix 5.1 cd, but each time I boot into
> knoppix. Knoppix starts, gets into enabling usb, etc and then it
> produces an error, "Can't find knoppix filesystem".
>
> I tried a Centos5 live CD and had something similar happen.
>
> Any suggestions? I really do want this laptop to become a dual boot
> pc. If need be, it can become a single boot Linux pc.

Hi JC,

I know EXACTLY what this is. It happened to me.

As computers have switched to EIDE CD/DVD drives, Linuxes haven't kept step 
with the EIDE drivers. The bios, which understands EIDE, boots the Knoppix 
CD, but then once Linux is running, it has no good driver for the EIDE DVD 
drive.

Knoppix 5.1.x is old, old, old and doesn't have the right driver. A lot of 
older Knoppix boot disks, whether for installing or for live distros, don't.

Sometimes the bios has a "compatible mode" for the EIDE. If so, you can put it 
in compatible mode and boot old, made for IDE distros. If not, you need a 
Linux boot disk with the proper EIDE drivers. IIRC sidux has the drivers, 
although I don't like it. IIRC the latest Mandriva One live cd has them too. 
I know for a fact that the full blown Mandriva 2008 fully boots and installs 
from an EIDE DVD drive just fine.

In the long run, this is a non-issue. The next set of versions will all have 
the proper drivers and will boot from the DVD drives, so right now you'll 
have to be choosy about your distro, but a year from now any old distro will 
boot just fine.

HTH

SteveT

Steve Litt
Recession Relief Package
http://www.recession-relief.US