Linux on laptops 1; getting Linux to work at all.

My second way of installing Linux is via the network, most office PCs have an ethernet card and if the PC I was installing on didn't have one, I could find a suitable card somewhere in the office, and I would know which Linux driver the card works with, otherwise I would not have bought it. Laptops have various ways of connecting to ethernet, none of them the same as desktop PCs, and again the question is whether a) we have the network card for the laptop and b) whether there is a Linux driver for it. I have often been pushed back to a last desperate system for installations with laptops. This is to connect a special cable between the printer port on the laptop and the printer port on a Linux PC. I start Linux on the laptop either with small Linux system on a floppy disk, or with a similar system loaded via modem. The "parallel lap link" cable, as it is called, is not as fast as ethernet, but it is still 10 times as fast as a modem, so enough to use Linux with the files somewhere else on the network. In this configuration I start to probe all the various parts of the laptop to find exactly what they are and I search the Internet for drivers. Only once I have determined whether I can get this laptop to do all that it needs to do, do I put the main system on. It may sound like I'm just not very good at this, and certainly someone who specialised with Linux on laptops would be faster than I am because of the experience she has from making installations every day, but the driver problem is a real one and it is especially a problem for Linux on laptops. I have read of a couple of people who have seen laptops available installed with either Windows or Linux and have decided to buy the Windows version and add Linux. It sounds like it has to work doesn't it? but the version of the laptop sold with Linux installed is not always the same as the version with Windows. If the laptop producer's staff can't find Linux drivers for all the parts of Windows laptop, they pay more to have parts which are more like a standard PC for the Linux version. Often the costs can be hidden through the savings

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