Hi, > I've an old dell laptop that is barely adequate for > Linux, and the pcmcia usb card doesn't seem to play > in Debian etch.
So there is no fixed USB in that laptop, and the BIOS probably does not support any USB. Modern BIOSes do support USB keyboard, mouse and storage (flash, cdrom, floppy, harddisk) connected via USB. Nice for DOS. Maybe you can use a "lighter" version of Linux? Does the laptop come with some sort of DOS pcmcia drivers? Or does the pcmcia usb card come with DOS drivers? > I was wondering if I would gain by just installing > freedos. Then the question is, does Freedos on a > laptop have drivers for the pcmcia, and usb? You would not gain much. There are free but commercial USB storage drivers from various vendors. I think all PCMCIA drivers are nonfree. The Deskwork.de shareware GUI has a bit of PCMCIA support, and IBM PC DOS and maybe others have card drivers, too. We even have the permission to use a code snippet from Deskwork if we want to make our own PCMCIA drivers, but nobody has started to work on this yet. The idea is to use this code, some ramdisk source code, the kernel initdisk source code, the udma PIO mode (no DMA in PCMCIA) and some ISA PnP code, throw them together, and then have a driver for PCMCIA CF disks and similar :-). There is also a generic semi-commercial USB driver kit from Georg Potthast. If you are good or if you can pay, it might be a way to make a cam driver based on this kit and an existing Linux cam driver. But then, the Linux cam driver will be GPL / open source and the driver of Georg is not, so licenses might be a problem here. Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by: Check out the new SourceForge.net Marketplace. It's the best place to buy or sell services for just about anything Open Source. http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;164216239;13503038;w?http://sf.net/marketplace _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
