Need PCMCIA help: Linksys PCMCIA card on laptop.

Red 1917 · n00b Joined: 21 May 2003 Posts: 14

I got an old Compaq Armada laptop today but I am having a hell of a time getting it networked. It came with a 'Instant Ethernet Combo PCMCIA EthernetCard.

Where to begin...well, the machine can see the card. 'cardctl ident' shows that the card is in the correct spot. However nothing I do can convince it to connect to the network. I tried net-setup, dhcpd, all that....

Whenever I run ifconfig, I do not see eth0, and i cannot get it to grab a 192.168.1.xxx IP.

Can someone please tell me if i'm doing anything wrong? I followed the instruction guide but it doesn't mention pcmcia at all. I'm kinda upset because I was hoping to get this working and I hate working on something all day.

tonycurtis · n00b Joined: 12 Jul 2003 Posts: 58

Please post the output of these commands:

$ lspci -v

$ uname -a

$ emerge -s pcmcia-cs

$ dmesg | tail -40 (right after insertion)

# rc-update -s

and your kernel's .config.

That should help us track down what's going on.

Red 1917 · n00b Joined: 21 May 2003 Posts: 14

Sorry for the terse first post, I was just upset about the whole thing and I went to bed after posting that heh.

This is all during the liveCD installation, so I dont even have the OS installed yet.

This is a linksys "combo pcmcia ethernetcard".

dmesg does tell me: (and this might be wrong/have typos, because i'm typing it)

Red 1917 · n00b Joined: 21 May 2003 Posts: 14

Oh if i check dmesg right after insertion it says:

eth0: no IPv6 routers present

is that my problem?

UberLord · Posted: Tue Feb 10, 2004 7:23 pm Post subject:

Red 1917 · n00b Joined: 21 May 2003 Posts: 14

i'm using the 1.4 cd, i'll look for the beta cd now. thanks.

edit- where do i get the beta cd iso?

edit2- I assume you mean the gentoo-2004.0-x86-20040204.iso cd?

UberLord · Posted: Tue Feb 10, 2004 11:27 pm Post subject:

Thats the betas.

I would try and stick installing from the officials myself though - there's no reason why a basic NE2000 shouldn't work - even through PCMCIA

tonycurtis · n00b Joined: 12 Jul 2003 Posts: 58

After you stick the card in, what does "ifconfig -a" say? And is cardmgr (from pcmcia-cs) running, if this is a 2.4 kernel?

Your card should be supported, I'm wondering if there's something not running from the LiveCD (quite possible) that you need to get this going.

Things are probably going to depend on whether your kernel has PCMCIA built-in or if it delegates driver support to the pcmcia-cs package.

Red 1917 · n00b Joined: 21 May 2003 Posts: 14

Hey, i'm bumpin this thread, i've been too busy to work on the laptop lately.

I still haven't gotten it fixed. Here's some more stuff I can tell you:

When the card is inserted, it emits a 'high' beep and then a few seconds later, a low beep. Does this mean something isn't wrong?

I can specify an IP and gateway address, and it will work...but only for a minute or two. A few seconds later, it stops pinging anything and I have to reboot for it to work.

So it is working, but only tempermentally.

Does this sound like a problem with the card? A problem with (I hope not) the hardware on my laptop?

Today or tomorrow I will go out to buy a pcmcia card to test, in case it's the card I have now. So I ask: Can anyone recomend a brand of card that you KNOW will work with linux?