On 9 Aug 2002 at 0:09, Heimo Claasen wrote:
>Thanks to the great number of very useful posts in this thread the
>difference between CF card IDE adapter and the PCMCIA slots has been
>well clarified indeed. (Well, at least for me as a non-techie who
>Boolean-naively had concluded simply that one cannot access a PCMCIA
>defined slot/device whithout some least operating system part working
>already; what Albert now more correctly defined as the chicken-and-egg
>problem).
>
>Now I regret to have done a wrong "investment" two years ago with a
>backpack (parallel port connected) CF card reader - far too expensive,
>relatively, and I even had to search far and wide for one; then.
>(I just didn't know about the IDE-related internals of those cards,
>and of the sheer existence of pertinent adapters.)
I'd say that it's not "wrong"... it just doesn't fit a need that was
unanticipated at the time. That parallel-port CF reader is still
useful, if you have a desktop that you'd like to hook it to and leave
it there, and you have a CF camera, or would like to use CF to exchange
data between your laptop and a desktop. IDE-to-CF is useful, but it
has its limits:
1. _NO_ hot-swap. If CF is operating in IDE mode, with a simple
adaptor, you cannot swap it without powering down the system.
2. Ease of use. It's a lot easier to "get at" an adaptor plugged into
the parallel port than one that's mounted inside the case.
>Nevertheless, I'd like to muse a bit more on this PCMCIA catch-22
>especially with laptops(*). Nosing around at some of the URLs for
>instance showed up one IDE adapter with a 8(!) MB card holding a
>scaled-down Linux (tapr.org) - that one would hardly hold the linux card
>service too but a larger one (in the 128 or 256 MB range) probably
>could; and with DOS, 8 MB wouldn't be of a problem anyway. With the two
>PCMCIA slots, which most of those not-quite-so-old (survPC-)laptops
>have, this could allow for reasonable workspace already.
Sure. I think that I would consider a larger CF device to replace the
hard drive. 8MB ought to be enough for command-line Linux, including
the card services... but it would be much handier to have 16MB or 32MB.
On the other hand, if you're going to need to use a swap file, then a
hard drive might be a better investment. Perhaps a used one - I've
occasionally seen the local computer stores offer ones that they've
swapped out of notebooks who's owners have upgraded the drive. Heck,
sometimes I've seen SurvPC notebooks sold cheap enough that it would be
worth purchasing one, and scapping the rest, to get the drive.
>(Lots of ensuing questions here, especially regarding how/where to have
>the screen drivers and such; and especially these laptop screens and
>video cards/chips have their whims, firmware or not.)
>
>All this would be "work-around" but easy to go such (and comparably
>cheap).
Yeah... laptop video support will probably be a bit iffy, depending on
the make/model of the laptop.
Good luck in your experimenting,
Anthony J. Albert
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Anthony J. Albert [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Systems and Software Support Specialist Postmaster
Computer Services - University of Maine, Presque Isle
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