Re: INSTALLING DEBIAN ON LAPTOP

Peter T. Breuer wrote:
> What do you mean by "an external floppy drive"? There is no such thing!
> Do you mean a usb floppy drive? If so, I doubt it will fly!
there are such things as external floppy drives for laptops, when i
worked as a pc sales rep, we had tons of toshiba and compaq buisness
laptops with external floppys. and this was in the days before USB was
even Implemented. I belive they used a sort of IDE emulation mode that
made the bios trick the system that there was a real floppy controller.

noway <nothere@blank.com> wrote:
> Peter T. Breuer wrote:
>> What do you mean by "an external floppy drive"? There is no such thing!
>> Do you mean a usb floppy drive? If so, I doubt it will fly!
> there are such things as external floppy drives for laptops, when i

You don't understand - it's an internal floppy drive, attached by an
external cable.

Think about it. The electrons don't know whether they're inside or
outside the laptop case.

> worked as a pc sales rep, we had tons of toshiba and compaq buisness
> laptops with external floppys. and this was in the days before USB was

Please return to cleaning telephone handsets ...

> even Implemented. I belive they used a sort of IDE emulation mode that
> made the bios trick the system that there was a real floppy controller.

No. It's a normal floppy connected to the normal floppy controller on
the normal motherboard, as normal. I've had "external" floppies in that
trivial sense on all my laptops since my first 486 (all toshibas or
ibms). They're internal floppies, connected by a cable. I suspect the
OP is talking about a USB floppy, which his install kernel probably
does not have a driver for!

Peter

On Wed, 30 Jul 2003 18:41:09 +0200, Peter T. Breuer
<ptb@oboe.it.uc3m.es> wrote:
> noway <nothere@blank.com> wrote:
>> Peter T. Breuer wrote:
>>> What do you mean by "an external floppy drive"? There is no such thing!
>>> Do you mean a usb floppy drive? If so, I doubt it will fly!
>> there are such things as external floppy drives for laptops, when i
>
> You don't understand - it's an internal floppy drive, attached by an
> external cable.
>
I think you are using some new definition of the word "external".


--
Check out this site:
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/

Bill Marcum <bmarcum@iglou.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Jul 2003 18:41:09 +0200, Peter T. Breuer
> <ptb@oboe.it.uc3m.es> wrote:
>> noway <nothere@blank.com> wrote:
>>> Peter T. Breuer wrote:
>>>> What do you mean by "an external floppy drive"? There is no such thing!
>>>> Do you mean a usb floppy drive? If so, I doubt it will fly!
>>> there are such things as external floppy drives for laptops, when i
>>
>> You don't understand - it's an internal floppy drive, attached by an
>> external cable.
>>
> I think you are using some new definition of the word "external".

I am. The original poster meant by "external", "usb". He should have
said "usb". I am telling him that the fact that it was outside or
inside is not important - it's all the same to the electrons in the wire
whether they are inside the case or outside! It's just a floppy mechanism
attached by cable to a standard floppy controller. I.e. something That
He Does Not Have. He has a usb floppy, not an "external" floppy,
in his terms, because what he is struggling to express is that his
floppy is somehow different, and the difference is its usb-ness.

Peter

Bill Marcum writes:
> I think you are using some new definition of the word "external".

He certainly is. Floppy drives such as he describes were common twenty
years ago and were definitely called "external". He's right that what the
OP has is almost certainly a USB drive, though. The distributed Debian
kernel won't boot from one of those.
--
John Hasler
john@dhh.gt.org
Dancing Horse Hill
Elmwood, Wisconsin

Jeroen Geilman <maybe_someday@nepadaptr.nl> wrote:
> In article <tpqbgb.ub2.ln@news.it.uc3m.es>, ptb@oboe.it.uc3m.es says...
>> Bill Marcum <bmarcum@iglou.com> wrote:
>> >>
>> > I think you are using some new definition of the word "external".
>>
>> I am. The original poster meant by "external", "usb". He should have
>> said "usb". I am telling him that the fact that it was outside or
>> inside is not important - it's all the same to the electrons in the wire
>> whether they are inside the case or outside! It's just a floppy mechanism
>> attached by cable to a standard floppy controller. I.e. something That
>> He Does Not Have. He has a usb floppy, not an "external" floppy,
>> in his terms, because what he is struggling to express is that his
>> floppy is somehow different, and the difference is its usb-ness.

> All of this is pretty strong assumption, as the OP neither responded to

I's MY "strong assumption", and that's always a "deduction". If his
floppy were an ordinary floppy, attached by an external cable or not,
the install would work fine. So it's not. Therefore it's a usb device.

> specific hardware he was describing...for all we know, it WAS an IDE-
> floppy device with a USB cable going into a serial port on his XBOX

Eh? That would be a usb floppy in any case.

> mainboard...

Peter