Damn Small Linux - Not!

rseven · Joined: 29 Jul 2006 Posts: 1

Okay. The laptop is an IBM Thinkpad 380xd, and works quite well with Damn Small Linux. Thing is, it has no integrated networking. I managed to find a Netgear FA511 fast ethernet card to use, and the 380xd does indeed support Cardbus/PCI.

However, DSL wouldn't recognize the FA511 properly ("illegal vendor ID"), so I decided to give DSL-n a shot. Lo and behold, it actually DID detect and load the drivers for the card this morning, so I installed DSL-n to the laptop's HDD and rebooted.

The card wasn't detected anymore. Sad

Inserting the card received no reaction whatsoever --- no HDD movement, no CPU spike, nothing new from `dmesg|tail`. I've been struggling all day to figure out what was different this morning that affected the card detection; I KNOW that it works by what happened this morning. the log revealed that the card was detected as a Linksys compatible ethernet card, then as its proper chipset, ADMsomethingorother. I forget exactly. The point is, it activated the eth0 interface and I could thus resolve an IP with my network. Now? Not anymore.

Anybody have any ideas as to why Cardbus cards aren't being detected after installing to the hard disk, even though it worked fine while using the live CD?

*EDIT*

And it looks like USB doesn't work either. I'm starting to suspect there's some kind of weird IRQ problem, but I have no clue where to begin with that.

*EDIT*

Yeah, IRQ assignment seems to be the problem.

*EDIT*

Booting up with pci=bios in the kernel parameters has sort of fixed the problem. USB devices are now working again and the PCMCIA card slots are detected properly --- however, my Netgear FA511 card is still only working part way. In a strange twist of irony, I'm getting an "Unrecognized device" error rather than an "Illegal vendor ID"; however, the subsystems (Netgear : 511a) are detected just fine. What's interesting is that the PCI bus address was 0000:04 in DSL, and is now 0000:05 in DSL-n. I'm curious as to whether that has anything to do with it, so if anybody else has had experience with this, say something.