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Topic: No signs of life through the PCMCIA ports

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K.Mandla

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Posts: 15
Joined: Feb. 2006

Posted: Feb. 03 2006,08:46

I've been having this problem in both DSL 2.1b and Ubuntu 5.10, on two different laptops and about three different PCMCIA cards.

Neither laptop (a Presario 1020 and an EzBook 700E) seems to notice any card present in the PCMCIA slots. I've tried two different wireless cards and a generic CF card adapter. Nothing shows up under lspci except the port hardware itself -- and yet all three cards work fine in an XPS M170. Lspci shows the card listed.

What's going on? Is this linked to the age of the laptops? Is there some way of alerting Linux to the presence of the PCMCIA card? I've tinkered with the PCMCIA tool, but it doesn't seem to have any effect.

Thanks for the help. Sorry if it's a noob question.

P.S.: Yes, all these cards were tested under XP, and they work fine, when the drivers are installed.

howlingmadhowie Offline

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Joined: Jan. 2006

Posted: Feb. 03 2006,17:37

i'm not sure if it will help, but i use /sbin/cardctl myself when switching off my pcmcia cards, before taking them out. but i have a feeling, that the pcmcia tool on dsl uses this command too.

the /sbin/cardctl programm can do quite a lot.

howie

<edited>

oh by the way, what is an xps-thingy? is that another type of laptop? what's the pcmcia slot called in lspci? (i've got a cardbus bridge, texas instruments pci1131 (rev 01)). do you see it mentioned in /proc/interrupts?

K.Mandla

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Posts: 15
Joined: Feb. 2006

Posted: Feb. 03 2006,21:29

Sorry. I should have been a little more specific. This is my M170. When I insert a card into the PCMCIA slot on that machine, I get this line in an lspci command ...

Code Sample

0000:04:00.0 Network controller: Texas Instruments ACX 111 54Mbps Wireless Interface

... which, as I understand it, is The Way Things Ought To Be. But inserting the same card into the PCMCIA slots on either of the older laptops gets me only the info for the cardbus hardware.

I'm starting to wonder if there was a change in PCMCIA protocol somwhere between 1998 and 2005 that keeps the older machines from acknowledging a newer PCMCIA card (without prodding from Windows, which is why they work in the EzBook under WinXP.)

I'll try the cardctl program and see if it helps at all. I have a feeling it might not, only because, like you said, the PCMCIA tool probably uses that same command, and it doesn't have any better luck seeing the cards.

Thanks a bunch. This stuff has been driving me batty for weeks now.

howlingmadhowie Offline

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Joined: Jan. 2006

Posted: Feb. 04 2006,09:10

i know that pcmcia cards have different shapes. i have a really old laptop, and some pcmcia cards just don't fit. the socket of the connection is different. one sometimes reads 'pcmcia type A' or 'type B'. i'm sure wiki will know more.

maybe the linux kernel relies on the hardware to do something which is done in software on xp. i dunno...

K.Mandla

Group: Members
Posts: 15
Joined: Feb. 2006

Posted: Feb. 05 2006,06:20

No, the cards fit perfectly. In fact, if I demean myself and install Windows XP, they'll work just fine. But for some reason, Linux can't see them, and so I never even get close to installing them.

Is there any way to force Linux to probe those ports? If I could at least acknowledge the hardware there, I could throw a driver at it and see if it worked.

8 replies since Feb. 03 2006,08:46

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