Laptops :: pcmcia detection and wireless



I have an old compaq presario 1070 (32 MB ram, 133MHz, 1GB hd) on which I have been trying to set up wireless with a Linksys WPC54G v2 card  (yes, it is a cardbus).

I have the proper windows driver (LSTINDS.INF), and ndiswrapper is documented to work with the card, but the card's power light never comes on, and the driver doesn't recognize it.

According to /proc/pci, the PCMCIA bridge is detected correctly, and a check with dmesg shows the obvious -- that the card itself is not detected.

Are many old laptops incomaptible with cardbus? Does anyone know if this laptop is one of them? Any other things I should check?

While I'm here, are there any recomendations on cheap, non-cardbus wireless cards?

BTW -  dsl is amazing!   I never expected to find something that fit what I wanted for this laptop for so well!    :cool:

Yes,

Many older laptops are incompatible with Carbus. You can search the Internet for specifications on your laptop to find the answer.

Or if you have a Windows (98 or newer) installation CD kicking around, you can temporarily install Windows and see if the device will work with your computer.

If you can get it to work from Windows, then the hardware is compatible with Cardbus.

As for recommendations, I have read good things about the Orinoco (my spelling is wrong?) series of Wireless PCMCIA cards and DSL.

The orinoco cards work well with most linux distros.
I just installed dsl on this compaq presario 1090es, & have gotten some info from the hp support web site about specs for my machine etc. They have chat support there that seemed helpful. If you can't get the info you need via previous replies to this post that might be a place to look   ??   wk
Thanks for the input.

I tried a friend's Orinoco non-cardbus card, and it didn't work either. DSL didn't even see that the card was plugged in. So, I am guessing that there is something more that needs doing. The old windows 95 that came with the comp was pretty heel-and-toe hooked in with the hardware, lots of proprietary stuff.

I'll have to check out the hp help you mention.

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