PCMCIA nic: getting it working with pcmcia-cs (for n00bs!)

charlieg · Posted: Thu Nov 20, 2003 10:05 am Post subject:

For all your orinoco puppies, the latest love sources (for the 2.6-test series) has some orinoco patches.
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Haro · n00b Joined: 17 May 2003 Posts: 71 Location: West Bend, WI

Hello

Just wondering if anyone have any success getting DWL-650 RevP or WPC11 Ver.4 working in gentoo? I'm having a hard time figuring what driver set to use (pcmcia-cs, wlan-ng, hostap, wtf!?) for either of them.

parity · Posted: Sat Dec 06, 2003 11:18 am Post subject: Thank you soo much

Hey...

just wanted to say thank you... this was exactly what i needed!
A short guide on how to set this up...

Got it working like a charm in no time....

so
THANK YOU!

- parity
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Zzoot · Posted: Mon Dec 08, 2003 3:05 am Post subject: OMFG!!!

Okay!!! I was ripping my hair out there for a while...

I finally found the keystone that let my wpc11 v3 card load correctly...(Damn second low beep...)

In the /etc/pcmcia/config.opts file there are some lines near the top that say "Don't use these irq's cause they're normally used for other more important things like a serial or parallel port" (Okay- I'm paraphrasing there...but that's about what it says...)

I commented out those lines, restarted pcmcia, and VOOM! 2 Good high beeps! WOO-HOO!

Anyway, thatks for everyone's 2 cents...Criminy...I know all this stuff so well now I can probably even go back and get the linux-wlan-ng stuff running for wep support...

jmf10024 · n00b Joined: 13 Dec 2003 Posts: 2 Location: Pittsburgh, PA

First of all, GREAT TUTORIAL. I have some experience writing documentation for non-computer people, and even though this is directed at a step above non-computer people, which are n00bs, this is very well done.

Now, my problem.

Latest dmesg is posted here http://jpad.homelinux.com/dmesg.log

I have an IBM Thinkpad 390 with pcmcia nic 3COM 3CCFE575BT.

After i originally rebooted after my first kernal install, it never booted. It hung at Init level 3 when trying to bring up the usb and pci devices. I am grateful that I have a removable card, because when i remove it I can boot so that I can make any necessary changes.

I have booted without the card and then reinserted the card. It beeps a bit and sometimes i have a few seconds before it hangs. In those few seconds I modprobed it once and ifconfiged it once and i saw my eth0. But after that it hung.

If I:

Zzoot · Posted: Sun Dec 14, 2003 5:27 pm Post subject:

Hiya jmf10024! (Say, How do you pronounce that?)

Anyway, this sounds real similar to a problem I've seen expressed and experienced here on the forums... It's that dang config.opts file again...Here...I'll just quote the original message...

jmf10024 · n00b Joined: 13 Dec 2003 Posts: 2 Location: Pittsburgh, PA

Hey, Zzoot.

jmf are my initials and 10024 is a randomish number.

anywho,
I read your post before i posted mine. And i tried that. No luck.

I have tried a bunch of stuff. i tried booting with acpi=off
and many other things. I tried changing my irqs in bios and disabling sound and such. No luck. In some cases it would boot for me and it would show up in ifconfig. but no connectivity. Before when i installed mandrake 9 a year ago there were problems with the device driver in linux. I don't know if they fixed it yet. I had to manually install some other driver.

I have given up for now, and have installed FreeBSD 5.1 which is making my nic work

. However, i would still like to try Gentoo, because my friends who raved about FreeBSD and got me hooked on it, now rave about Gentoo.

Better ports, better updating source, etc.

So if anyone has any other input I would be glad to try it, though it may not be for a few weeks, cause I want to use my laptop (which is very low end nowadays) to use as a small fileserver at a lan party.

Thanks for all your help

Justin

P.S. I love FreeBSD, but if i can get my nic to work i would love to try out GENTOO.
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Zzoot · Posted: Wed Dec 24, 2003 10:06 pm Post subject: DOH!

Hiya JmF10024...

I'm not sure whether or not I hope this is right or not...but I just went through that dmesg you posted under a link...

It looks like you've got pcmcia services enabled IN the kernel...

charlieg · Posted: Tue Jan 13, 2004 3:34 am Post subject: Re: DOH!

R!tman · Posted: Thu Jan 22, 2004 11:20 am Post subject:

Nicely done. Thanks.

dkaplowitz · Posted: Sun Jan 25, 2004 11:09 pm Post subject:

Thanks, charlieg for the thread. I knew I was close to having my xircom realport NIC working, but I needed just one of the instructions you posted to have it work by default.

Love these forums!

Dave

P.S. I think this thread should be a sticky at the top of this forum.
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charlieg · Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2004 12:39 am Post subject:

dkaplowitz · Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2004 1:43 pm Post subject:

feliperal · Apprentice Joined: 09 Mar 2003 Posts: 168

I am reaching my patience with the Cisco 350 card on my laptop. I was able to make it recognized in pcmcia-cs 3.2.5 and it loads the appropiate airo_cs and airo drivers:

feliperal · Apprentice Joined: 09 Mar 2003 Posts: 168

The solution is to use 3.2.7 pcmcia-cs instead of 3.2.5

gntu · n00b Joined: 04 Jun 2003 Posts: 41

This HOWTO was very helpful. I just want to add a few comments and document my own adventure along this road.

Originally I tried to avoid using the pcmcia-cs card services package and use instead the newer "hotplug" functionality in the 2.4 kernel. Hotplug overlaps with card services functionality insofar as being able to manage the pccard slots. Hotplug is a more universal protocol, however, that can also manage USB devices in 2.4, and is expected to play an even bigger role in 2.6 as the emerging sysfs infrastructure further develops.

Hotplug in 2.4 can be selectively enabled for PCI and/or USB busses. PCI hotplug support however is marked experimental. I tried enabling pci hotplugging and core PCMCIA/CardBus support, both in the kernel and then as modules (pcmcia_core.o, yenta_socket.o, and ds.o), and in the first instance, the machine booted and networking configured itself, but networking did not survive a sleep/wake cycle. In fact, I could not restart networking at all after a sleep/wake cycle. In the second instance, for some reason hotplug did not load the ds.o module. I had to load it through /etc/modules.autoload.d (which should be unnecessary for hotpluggable devices), after which networking configured itself. Again, networking did not survive a sleep/wake cycle; un/loading the associated modules did not help.

So I eventually gave up on hotplug and disabled it completely per the instructions at the beginning of this thread. The only other obstacle I encountered was a need to disable "systrace" under General Settings in the kernel config. Until I disabled systrace, binding tulip_cb to socket 1 operation was "not permitted".

I was initially dissuaded from trying pcmcia-cs by the perceived nuisance of installing a separate kernel-related package and by reading Hinds' own README on the status of this project. My reading of this left me with the impression that CardBus cards that use standard pci card client drivers (e.g. the DecTulip driver tulip.o under ISA/EISA/PCI for Ethernet10/100 is the hotplug-compatible driver for a Netgear FA511) are ignored by the user-level tools in pcmcia-cs. This is indeed true *when* PCI hotplug support is enabled in the kernel and the card is using the hotplug-compatible client driver. By disabling hotplug support and letting pcmcia-cs compile its own client driver (tulip_cb.o in the case of the Netgear FA511), I now have a configuration of the cardbus socket that pcmcia-cs user level tools can manage.

And yes, networking can be restarted after a sleep/wake cycle!

Cqwense · n00b Joined: 28 Nov 2003 Posts: 52

First off, while i'm still having problems, this HOWTO was very well put together, and as there are lots more "Thx for getting my wireless to work" posts than non's, im guessing the problem is somewhere on my end.

First off, an explination of what has heppend so far. I currently have a windows desktop running a usb wireless to troll boards and DL files, my gentoo box is being setup to be a gateway/firewall for the rest of the network. So currently it is not online ( untill i can at least get the wireless working ) Therefore i didnt emerge pcmcia-cs, i used the windows box, downloaded the package , and manually install it. ( ps, I wanted to put the downloaded file in some default emerge install directory, fooling it into emerging the package without actually downloading it via emerge , any help on this would be appriciated ). From there i compiled my kernel to match the howto's, configured and installed pcmcia-cs, and then spent five hours trying to make it work :)

Kernel version is 2.4, wireless card is a D-link DWL-250 (

Here are my problems ( in no particular order ), as a newb i cant really tell how many are directly related to the others.

1)
when I:

charlieg · Posted: Tue Feb 03, 2004 1:15 am Post subject:

Have you looked at the pcmcia-cs website to see if your card is supported? Sadly, I couldn't see it.
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mizery de aria · Guru Joined: 07 Dec 2003 Posts: 309

I just installed PCMCIA-CS 3.2.7
I also just removed PCMCIA from the 2.6.3 kernel:

charlieg · Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2004 3:02 pm Post subject:

mizery de aria · Guru Joined: 07 Dec 2003 Posts: 309

charlieg · Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2004 7:37 pm Post subject:

mizery de aria · Guru Joined: 07 Dec 2003 Posts: 309

*bump*
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charlieg · Posted: Tue Feb 17, 2004 4:24 pm Post subject:

Nope, your sig is still unacceptable. ("Kill yourself"?)
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