pcmcia detection and wireless

Forum: Laptops
Topic: pcmcia detection and wireless
started by: tortoise

Posted by tortoise on Jan. 10 2005,23:58

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:

Posted by cbagger01 on Jan. 12 2005,04:03

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.

Posted by lostcity on Jan. 15 2005,02:57

The orinoco cards work well with most linux distros.

Posted by dmslowlnxusr on Jan. 19 2005,19:08

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

Posted by tortoise on Jan. 19 2005,20:43

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.

Posted by gmandual on Feb. 01 2005,09:46

Quote (tortoise @ Jan. 19 2005,15:43)

check the output of:

cat /proc/pci | more

and go through and look for entries for a "Cardbus" bridge or "PCI <-> PCMCIA Bridge" or something to that effect. That should give you an idea of whether you are dealing with a Cardbus compatible PCMCIA controller chip on the motherboard. The old compaqs "used" to all use a Cirrus cardbus compatible pcmcia controller, but it has been quite a while since I have serviced those older compaq laptops.

Once you figure out which type of PCMCIA controller chipset you have, you will want to do a bit of research to make sure the kernel module for your chipset is provided with the DSL installation.

I believe you can also run:

pcic_probe

from a console window and it will attempt to identify your PCMCIA controller chipset.

Posted by tortoise on Feb. 01 2005,18:11

Thanks, that's exactly the info I needed.

The bridge, according to pcic_probe is a Cirrus Logic CL 6729.
And according to pcic_probe -m it takes the i82365 kernel module.

However, the bridge is not detected by that module because it is in a unique situation according to < this mailing-list archive >. A "historical accident" :;):

In order to get the bridge to work I need the old pcmcia-cs module, and with only a 1Gig hard-drive and 133MHz cpu, doing a kernel make would max out system resources

pitty. ... unless a new version of dsl comes out that uses a 2.6x kernel (which has the needed driver).

Posted by AwPhuch on Feb. 01 2005,19:52

Quote (tortoise @ Feb. 01 2005,13:11)

In order to get the bridge to work I need the old pcmcia-cs module, and with only a 1Gig hard-drive and 133MHz cpu, doing a kernel make would max out system resources

pitty. ... unless a new version of dsl comes out that uses a 2.6x kernel (which has the needed driver).

Time to find you a compatible b true pcmcia card

Brian
AwPhuch

Posted by tortoise on Feb. 01 2005,20:27

Ooh. I just had a thought.
The pcmcia-cs readme indicates that it doesn't require a full kernel install, but it does require the full kernel source. I might be able to swing that.

Does dsl use the debian kernel sources, or does it have it's own?
Also, I noticed that the myDSL has a gcc for dsl 0.8. Would that work for dsl 0.92 or would I need to get gcc from somewhere else?

Posted by gmandual on Feb. 01 2005,21:43

Install the "apt-pkg" tools from the mydsl server. Then you should be able to use apt-get to install the binaries for pcmcia-cs from the debian packages servers.

That should get you the binary module you need to support your PCMCIA bridge in your laptop. I don't remember if you are running a HDD install or a CD install, if you are running a HDD then the above procedure might cause you some problems. With overwriting something you didn't want.

Tonight when I get home will see if I can extract out the needed file from one of the debian binary packages for you, and stick it up online somewhere where you can download it. That way you can just copy it over without having to worry about blowing something up.

Posted by tortoise on Feb. 01 2005,22:38

It's an HDD install.

Thanks much for the help.
Greatly appreciated.

Posted by B0SC0 on Feb. 24 2005,15:14

I am in the same boat, except I am running from the floppy 0.93

LAptop is an AST J50 133mhz 40mb ram 2gig hard drive, floppy, backpack cd -rewriter (parallel port)

D-link DWL-650 PCMCIA Prism2

Cirus Logic CL6729 rev 226

I/O at 0x3e3

i82365 kernel module

Noob

Cant find apt-pkg tools.

HAs anyone got this to work?

TIA

B0SC0

Posted by bubbasito on Mar. 01 2005,04:28

Same problem here

IBM Thunkpad 390e

Texas Instruments PCI1251A (heh heh)
i82365 needed

n00b also

HDD install

IBlitzz Wireless Super G (BWP712)
Don't know if it will work at all, but wanting to try

Bubba/SnArFf