Writing Tux Daemon
- Linux On Mobile Computers - -> Linux Mobile Guide

CD Drive

Most notebooks today come with CD drives. If floppy and CD drive are swappable they are usually mutually exclusive, however many vendors (HP, Dell) provide cables which allow the floppy module to be connected to the parallel port. Sometimes the CD drives comes as external PCMCIA device (e.g. SONY), or as SCSI device (e.g. HP OmniBook 800), USB device (e.g. SONY), or as Firewire (e.g. SONY VAIO VX71P). Such an external devices might bear problems to install Linux from it.

As far as I know there are SONY DiscMans available which have a port to connect them to a computer or even a SCSI port. I found an article published by Ziff-Davis Publishing Company (September 1996 issue, but missed to note the URL) written by Mitt Jones: "Portable PC Card CD-ROM drives transform laptops into mobile multimedia machines", which listed: Altec Lansing AMC2000 Portable Multimedia CD-ROM Center; Axonix ProMedia 6XR; CMS PlatinumPortable; EXP CDS420 Multimedia Kit; H45 QuickPCMCIA CD; Liberty 115CD; Panasonic KXL-D740; Sony PRD-250WN CD-ROM Discman.

To here music from internal CD drives usually works without problems. But note:

Tip

Some notebooks come with an external CD drive, you need an extra cable to connect the sound output of the drive to the sound input of the notebook.