Of Vaio's and Toughbooks

Well, it's been a morning.  After one of those nights...

I noticed that there was something missing from the Vaio last night.  The PC card slot cover was gone.  I knew it had been there before, but...  Well, I found it, laying where I'd dropped the Vaio...  Sigh...

This lead to some desperate repair attempts at c. 1am, which is not a good time to be doing such things.  Alas, no success.

A quick trip to the Computer-Shop-Across-the-River this morning provided only partial relief.  The door simply would not go back in properly.  Oh well...  I remembered some PCMCIA USB cards I had, and thought that might be a good thing for the Vaio, given this system only has two USB ports, and one of those is under a cover...

After some bouncing around, taking care of other matters, I came home to find a nice surprise:  The replacement CD/DVD drive for the CF-29 had arrived.  A quick swap with the old unit, and...  Yes!  Worked fine.  Excellent!

To do a quick check, I popped in an old copy of Precise Puppy 5.4.3...  Oops!  That's PAE enabled, and the CF-29 isn't.    But Precise 5.6 doesn't have a PAE requirement, and it booted perfectly.  The touch screen still goes wonky, but otherwise...  Great!

OK, the CF-29 taken care of, back to the Vaio.  After some digging, I found one of the USB cards, and popped it into the card slot.  Booted into Lubuntu (now set in "Notebook" mode), and...

Nothing.  It's not seeing the card.  I insert a USB thumb drive.  Nothing...  Not seeing/mounting the drive...  Check for drivers.  Nothing...  Check for settings.  Nothing...

  OK, re-insert the card....  OK, reboot...

Nothing.

Deep sigh.  Think zen thoughts.  Reach for the Precise Puppy 5.6.1 disk, newly burned last night.

Reboot.  Set up everything.  Insert the thumb drive.  Look...

Hey...  is that a USB thumb drive showing up on the screen?  Click to mount...

It works!  Perfectly!

That does it.  On impulse, I fire up Gparted, repartition the drive, and hit the Puppy Universal Installer.  Within minutes, I have a Puppy "frugal" install on the hard drive.  My first.  Reboot, do the setups and checks...

Perfect.

I can live with the no suspend mode for now, and with the USB card jutting out of the side of the machine.  Everything's working, so I'm happy.

We'll go from there....