From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Nov 22 13:35:19 1996 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id NAA19200 for questions-outgoing; Fri, 22 Nov 1996 13:35:19 -0800 (PST) Received: from gdi.uoregon.edu (gdi.uoregon.edu [128.223.170.30]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id NAA19195 for ; Fri, 22 Nov 1996 13:35:12 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost (dwhite@localhost) by gdi.uoregon.edu (8.8.3/8.6.12) with SMTP id NAA01215; Fri, 22 Nov 1996 13:36:09 -0800 (PST) Date: Fri, 22 Nov 1996 13:36:09 -0800 (PST) From: Doug White Reply-To: dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu To: Peter Mutsaers cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD on Laptops. Is something missing? In-Reply-To: <87wwvhz10u.fsf@plm.xs4all.nl> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-questions@FreeBSD.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On 20 Nov 1996, Peter Mutsaers wrote: > JH> Also, someone posted this URL a while back, which should help you out: > JH> http://www.mt.cs.keio.ac.jp/person/hosokawa/PAO/ > > Aha, this URL is very useful. There is a complete pcmcia package with > many drivers. I have a Megahertz pcmcia ethernet card which is > supported. It is only surprising that this is not in the standard > (current) kernel since it would save a lot of people the work of > patching the kernel sources etc. The problem is that they have to remove most of the devices from the boot floppy to fit the pccard stuff on. So you end up with a really bare boot floppy that may not work for everyone because they had to remove the Seagate SCSI card driver and your FreeBSD disk is hanging off one of those. Second, the PAO floppies are built post-RELEASE by someone outside the FreeBSD developer's team, so when the CD goes to press the new boot floppy hasn't been rolled yet. Putting the last RELEASE's PAO floppy on the current RELEASE CDROM doesn't make sense when you have to do a net install anyway. :( I suppose the developer team could pull Hosokawa in, it's a question if he's willing to do that. Third, the machines that don't work with the default GENERIC kernel are few and far between. I've seen three machines just recently with problems detecting the 3c589s (one personally) but that is a rash. Normally I don't get much questions about it on -questions. I agree that it would be nice to have that support on the CDROM as an alternate boot floppy image. But it's a question if FreeBSD wants to incorporate (and support) that software. Doug White | University of Oregon Internet: dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu | Residence Networking Assistant http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~dwhite | Computer Science Major