[I just subscribed, but I read this in the November archive.] >Greetings: > >I am considering the purchase of an external cd-rom drive to load linux on >laptops. I would welcome any and all suggestions as to which might be >"cheapest and best". > >Regards, > >Tim
I use an Addonics PCMCIA based CD-ROM. As long as you mount card services (on a slink install, getting the first two disks in seems to be enough for this) it looks like an ordinary IDE and you are on your way. It was $129 near me several months ago. Ymmv. (The key point in my original purchase decision was a tiny note on the box claiming if you had win95 or 98, you did not need the driver disk in the box. Thus I assumed its interface was fairly generic... and I seem to be correct in that assumption.) I have heard that Backpacks (which are parallel based) are also well supported by Linux, though I haven't tried them. I would think that a parallel CD would be rather slow compared to a CardBus/IDE linkage. On the other hand, you can use them on any system, even desktops and weird laptops whose cardbus isn't supported. Since you didn't say what kind of laptop, or whether you need to support more than one, I figured that was worth mentioning. -* Heather Stern * Starshine Technical Services * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *-
