Laptops :: PCMCIA help on a toshiba laptop

I have a toshiba satellite 1555 CDS laptop pc I want to run Damn Small Linux on. The pc specs are:

- AMD 380mhz k6
- 32mb Ram
- 4 gig hard drive

I can get dsl to run fine on the machine, but when it boots I have to run dsl nopcmcia Any other way I try to boot, dsl will hang after detecting the cpu (failsafe also works)

I have a pcmcia ethernet card I need to use to get on the net. The laptop doesnt have a built in ethernet adapter. The card is a Etherlink 3 LAN pc card #3C589D

Is there anyway to configue this card after I skip the detection on boot. I was reading this link:

http://www.icewalkers.com/Linux/Howto/PCMCIA-HOWTO-6.html#new-card

and when I run cardmgr I get cardmgr[472] no pcmcia driver in proc/devices

I am completely lost on this one. Can anyone help me get on the web?

Try DSL version 0.5.3.1

This version is based on KNOPPIX 3.2 which supposedly runs on your laptop.

Supposedly, this laptop has a nonstandard pcmcia socket (whatever that means) so it has problems with the default pcmcia services.

I tried ver 0.5.3.1, and it detected it, but locked on line cardmgr[55]: executing: 'modprobe 3c589_cs'

I put in a knoppix 3.8 cd and it detected it fine, but knoppix is to slow on this machine, even with ice or fluxbox. Can I copy the config file for the card in knoppix and paste it in my damn small config?

I doubt it.

Knoppix 3.8 kernel is 2.6.x series, while DSL kernel is 2.4.x series.

tp671,
It might be a simple problem of pcmcia services allocating an irq for your network card which conflicts with something else - most likely a serial port.
See my post "Avoiding PCMCIA device conflicts with serial" - http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....nflicts
The icewalkers.com link you mentioned explained this issue, too.
When you run "cat /proc/interrupts" you should see a list of all irq's in use, but often the serial ports and serial devices are missing from the list. From your bios or laptop documentation try to find out what these irq's are (or should be) - probably irq 3 & 4. Then exclude these irq's from being used by pcmcia services by modifying /etc/pcmcia/config.opts.

If you're running a hard drive install, this fix should work fine.
But if you're running the liveCD it will be difficult to change the /etc/pcmcia/config.opts file before pcmcia services load.

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