I have a Sony VAIO PCG-SR33, and it has a single pcmcia slot. The cdrom is external, available via pcmcia. I can boot and pass the gentoo installer kernel the ide2=0x180 argument to make it available during the install, but the pcmcia-cs package is not on the 2006 live cd. As such I can't install it. Without it, I cannot then use the network after rebooting and removing the pcmcia cdrom and replacing it with my pcmcia network card. My next option would likely be to put the required packages on a usb floppy drive, and copy them over. The kernel pcmcia support locks up the box every time. This is enough work that I'm just planning to use a smarter installer, but I would like to put Gentoo on this box. I also had to use "nohotplug", or the boot would hang at probing usb, and I had to use "nox", as it failed to properly configure X every time. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Boot on vaio pcg-sr33 with options gentoo ide2=0x180 vga=0x315 nohotplug doapm acpi=off nox using 2006 live cd 2. Run installer and install via console. 3. In a terminal, run "emerge pcmcia-cs" and watch it fail. 3. Reboot 4. Use your new Gentoo laptop without the network.
1/ pcmcia-cs is obsolete; use pcmciautils instead 2/ Generally fail to see what are you requesting here, it's not our fault that you've bought a laptop w/ a weird CDROM and just one PCMCIA slot.
(In reply to comment #1) > 1/ pcmcia-cs is obsolete; use pcmciautils instead The gentoo handbook says to use pcmcia-cs. If pcmciautils is included in the portage snapshot on the live cd, then I have no problem. > 2/ Generally fail to see what are you requesting here, it's not our fault that > you've bought a laptop w/ a weird CDROM and just one PCMCIA slot. I'm requesting the same support that I get from RedHat, CentOS, Ubuntu, and any other distro that recognizes pcmcia devices at boot time and ensures that support for those devices is installed.