tlug: Problem with Sony PCG-N505

["Manuel M. T. Chakravarty" <chak@example.com>]

Hi!

I ordered a Sony PCG-N505 note book only to discover that
(unlike older 505s) the included floppy drive is a USB
device, which spoils may plan to install Linux via Ethernet
on the machine, because the kernel on the boot disk cannot
find a floppy device to read the auxiliary disk containing
PCMCIA support for the install (booting from the boot disk
works, even with USB).

Does anybody have any creative ideas about what I can do?
I guess there is no way to get Linux' half-baked USB support 
to work at boot time.  

For those not knowing the machine, I should probably note
that the thing has no builtin CD-ROM.  There is an external
CD-ROM using some (it seems) Sony-specific PCMCIA-like card,
but I never had any success getting that to work with Linux
on an older 505.  (I am attempting to put RedHat 6.0 on the
thing.)

Any suggestions?

Cheers,

Manuel
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