Pcmcia not working


Forum: Laptops
Topic: Pcmcia not working
started by: mem0

Posted by mem0 on Oct. 27 2004,03:47
When running DSL on my Dell Inspiron 9100, the pcmcia doesn't seem to be working. The power light wireless card does not turn on. I tried to restart the pcmcia slot (/etc/init.d/pcmcia restart) but that doesn't seem to be the way to restart pcmcia on DSL. How do I get the pcmcia to restart(or start)?
Posted by AwPhuch on Oct. 27 2004,17:57
What are you putting in the pcmcia slot?

My Wireless card wont power on until the drivers are loaded

Is that a cardbus card or a pcmcia
If it has a gold strip where the card plugs into the pins it cardbus, it its metal all the way down its pcmcia

some laptops wont support cardbus
< http://support.dell.com/support....&osl=EN >

Brian
AwPhuch

Posted by mem0 on Oct. 27 2004,19:42
The laptop supports cardbus, the card works on other versions of knoppix. Also cardbus appears to be starting fine.

On boot i get there is the line:
PCMCIA found, starting cardmgr.

There are no errors until:
AutoConfiguring Devices... modprobe: Can't locate module block-major-2 modprobe: modporbe: Can't locate module block-major-2

apm also craps but i'm not so concerned with that now

thanks for any help you can offer.

Posted by mem0 on Oct. 27 2004,19:46
Oh yeah, the card is a linksys instant wireless network pc card.
Posted by mem0 on Oct. 27 2004,19:50
Quote (AwPhuch @ Oct. 27 2004,13:57)
My Wireless card wont power on until the drivers are loaded

really? hmm... then maybe DSL just doesn't have drivers for my card.
Posted by AwPhuch on Oct. 27 2004,21:20
Yes it does...
I have the exact same card WPC11 ver3
it uses the
Code Sample
hermes
orinoco
orinoco_cs

modules

What version of DSL are you using...

Brian
AwPhuch

Posted by mem0 on Oct. 27 2004,22:26
DSL 0.8.2 d/led it yesterday.
Posted by caulktel on Oct. 27 2004,23:22
mem0,  What version? V2.5, 3.0, 4.0. The new version 4.0 card have no Linux drivers, so you would need to use ndiswrapper which alows you to use the Windows drivers that came with the card.
Posted by mem0 on Oct. 27 2004,23:25
i have a v3 card. Which works on fedora, slackware and at least 1 other knoppix variant.

I just tried a netgear wireless card and it did not power up either. I think it's a problem with PCMCIA itself.

Posted by caulktel on Oct. 27 2004,23:44
I'm using a WPC-11 V.3 card and it works fine, so the problem isn't with drivers. It Quite possibly may be a irq conflict. Do you have any other PCMCIA cards installed? I know that when I run both the Linksys card and a Kodak PCMCIA to Compact Flash adapter at the same time my sound stops working. On my laptop I am able to change irq settings in the bios setup, and was able to solve my problem by shutting off IR support. Just a thought.
Posted by mem0 on Oct. 28 2004,14:54
There are no  other PCMCIA cards, doh!

I d/led Knoppix and it works fine with the card
I guess i'm just going to have to start removing packages from knoppix to make it smaller.

Posted by ke4nt1 on Oct. 28 2004,15:04
Hmm..

There are a wealth of DSL users successfully using this card.

Have you searched the forums for "dell" ?
There has been some threads recently about Dell releasing
new bios updates to remedy certain problems ,
some pertaining to liveCD use...

When you are in knoppix, and you run "lsmod" or
"cat /proc/pci" , what do you see different in the lists
from when you run the same commands in DSL ?

73
ke4nt

Posted by mem0 on Oct. 29 2004,16:12
Yay! I found the problem!

after checking /etc/init.d/pcmcia i found that it was symlinked to itself... kinda funny. Is it supposed to be like this? anyway ...

So i ran (as root):

modprobe orinoco_cs

the card turned on! Then

ifconfig eth0 up

Viola. Wireless worked.

Thanks to everyone for their help.

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