No signs of life through the PCMCIA ports
Forum: Laptops
Topic: No signs of life through the PCMCIA ports
started by: K.Mandla
Posted by K.Mandla on 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.
Posted by howlingmadhowie on 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?
Posted by K.Mandla on 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.
Posted by howlingmadhowie on 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...
Posted by K.Mandla on 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.
Posted by howlingmadhowie on Feb. 05 2006,16:31
apart from trying out all the possible cardctl options, i can't really think of anything that would help. i trust you've tried < this >.howie
Posted by K.Mandla on Feb. 05 2006,18:51
Yup. I have to admit, though, that most of it was way over my head. I did find < a thread > that talked about success modifying the GRUB loader to include acpi=off, and when I tried it I could access the CF card reader. The wireless cards still refuse.
It's promising, though. If I can figure out what file format to use to mount the CF card reader, I can at least move stuff back and forth from laptop to laptop without too much stress. It would be a step in the right direction. I would prefer they were directly accessing the network.
Cheers. Thanks for the help.
Posted by K.Mandla on Feb. 13 2006,07:14
Well, it is time for me to admit defeat. I played my last card today, and came up with nothing to show for it.I recompiled the kernel for the EzBook 700e, this time leaving out the PCMCIA structure that was built in by default. Hours later, I installed it, ran it and tried to build in the < PCMCIA services for Linux > package.
Unfortunately, that turned into an entirely new can of worms -- and one I decided I didn't want to open. I couldn't be sure it would be of any real use, and in addition, most of the resources I needed were online ... and without my PCMCIA wireless, I can't get online with that machine.
So I was caught in a bit of a Catch-22. That's quite a catch, that Catch-22. Best there is.
Perhaps one day when I have more than just a month's experience with Linux and a better grasp of hardware quirks, I'll tackle the problem again. I don't know how Windows is able to activate those cards on these machines, but the solution is beyond my grasp.
Either way, my efforts are posted here for the benefit of the next person who stumbles onto this problem. I wish them better luck. I appreciate the help I found in this forum and the suggestions everyone made, even if it was just "install ndiswrapper, dude."
The real tragedy is this: The function for either of these laptops is as a passive network monitor (not even an Internet gateway, just a monitor), so without Internet access, they are of little use to me. I think they shall pass into the great afterworld of technology, the digital heaven, the place where all good computers go when they die ...
eBay.
Cheers and good luck. See you all around the boards.
Posted by K.Mandla on Feb. 20 2006,07:59
Hi. Just thought I'd update this thread for the benefit of anyone else who happens to have this problem. In short, there were two or three different things going on here, and while the problems looked the same, they weren't.
First of all, the Linksys WPC54G ver. 2 is a terribly finicky card. I won't talk down about it too much out of deference to the folks that have one, but it's quite tricky to work with. If you've gotten it to work, consider yourself lucky. If it's not working for you and you're banging your head against a wall ... stop. Take it back to Wal-Mart or sell it on eBay. There are cards out there that are much easier to work with, and they're not nearly as expensive.
Second, the Presario 1020 that I mentioned in earlier posts has a peculiar hardware structure for the PCMCIA bays. It's a Cirrus Logic setup (I forget the specific number), but as I understand it, it will require a special kernel compiled with that structure to make it work. That's why nothing was working on that machine save the CF reader, which did not require special attention like a powered PCMCIA wireless card would.
And since we're on the subject ... there are quite a few differences between newer kernels (such as the 2.6.9+ that is installed with Ubuntu 5.10 by default) and earlier versions (such as the 2.4.31 built into Slackware 10.2, for example). If your PCMCIA ports seem dead under newer kernels, you might benefit from dropping back to the 2.4 series, or recompiling with the pure pcmcia-cs source.
Finally, older wireless cards (802.11b-only cards, for example) are a bit more forgiving with older equipment -- as you might imagine. That doesn't mean they're perfect, but it does mean that with enough poking and prodding, I had much more success with a b card than a g card.
Which is ironic in another sense, because I spent the afternoon installing WindowsMe (I know, I know) on my father's computer, and after it was all said and done, we tried to change out his old b card for a new g card, and it flat out refused to work. The b card was quite eager and worked without a hitch. But the fancy g card wanted nothing to do with WinMe. Can you blame it?
In the end, the working setup was the CTX EzBook 700e running Slackware 10.2 (2.4.31 kernel) and a Microsoft MN-520 wireless b card. It took a lot of .conf editing to get Slack to run, but it worked after an hour's tweaking or so. My heart leapt skyward when Slack rebooted and two little lights came to life on the wireless. It was a joy to behold. And when I tried it under DSL 2.2b, it was equally successful.
An additional note: Personally, I found Slack to be cumbersome. The setup is a little confusing for the newb and quasi-newb, although it's still a far cry from Gentoo. If you're having the same problem I was, and you want something fleshier than DSL but not as clunky as Slack, download the Ubuntu Hoary install. As I understand it, Hoary never got past kernel 2.4.27, which means you might have better luck getting that old P-II with the wireless b card to surf the net than you would with Breezy. Of course, you'll have to use a different desktop environment than Gnome or KDE, since your machine probably won't be able to keep up with either of those!
Cheers and thanks!
Disclaimer: I have all of a month and a half's experience with Linux, and while I've learned a LOT in that time about hardware and software, I am definitely not a guru. If I've suggested or said something that's just plain wrong, please forgive me ... or better yet, correct me, so I can learn where my error lies. Cheers! -- K.Mandla