Weird PCMCIA problem

Sargonas · Posted: Tue Feb 11, 2003 12:06 am Post subject:

Did you build pcmcia support into the kernel (module or into the kernel) because that was one of my first mistakes. you have to build the wireless card drivers but just not the pcmcia into the kernel. Then let pcmcia_cs start up the card and modprobe everything.
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grishnav · n00b Joined: 09 Feb 2003 Posts: 42

Sargonas · Posted: Tue Feb 11, 2003 12:37 am Post subject:

Im sorry my previous post was wrong, I went into my config and I didnt build pcmcia or wireless drivers in I built hermes and prism support in .... not the drivers. Im sorry I remember having to build something in to get it working. Sorry about that!!!
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I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure -- that is all Agnosticism means. - Clarence Darrow

grishnav · n00b Joined: 09 Feb 2003 Posts: 42

Sargonas · Posted: Tue Feb 11, 2003 12:58 am Post subject:

No problem anything I can do to help. Keep us update on whether it works out!
_________________
I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure -- that is all Agnosticism means. - Clarence Darrow

grishnav · n00b Joined: 09 Feb 2003 Posts: 42

No such luck.

Any more suggestions?

grishnav · n00b Joined: 09 Feb 2003 Posts: 42

bump for great justice!!!

Sargonas · Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2003 1:21 am Post subject:

does your card use prism or hermes? Mine use the hermes modules and not the prism.
_________________
I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure -- that is all Agnosticism means. - Clarence Darrow

grishnav · n00b Joined: 09 Feb 2003 Posts: 42

Sargonas · Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2003 3:43 am Post subject:

when making the *config I did the help on each and it said what types of card was used by each.
_________________
I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure -- that is all Agnosticism means. - Clarence Darrow

grishnav · n00b Joined: 09 Feb 2003 Posts: 42

w00t

/me got it working!

Will post details later... too sleep now... had something to do with incorrect module for pcmcia controller... or something... yeah, post tomorrow...

Sargonas · Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2003 3:25 pm Post subject:

Awesome! I hope something I said was of help!! Glad you got it working though
_________________
I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure -- that is all Agnosticism means. - Clarence Darrow

grishnav · n00b Joined: 09 Feb 2003 Posts: 42

ack... sorry for not posting a reply as promised... I refused to boot back into my windows partition, and I wanted to get a GUI going to use the site with (I'm not a huge fan of text-based browsing

). I'm happy to report I'm posting this using my wireless card, X, fluxbox, and Phoenix! Yay for open source!

Anyway. What I ended up doing:

unmerge pcmcia-cs
compile all kernel pcmcia drivers, and wireless drivers (all available documentation states to use the pcmcia-cs package's drivers, which didn't work for me)
emerge pcmcia-cs
and all was good

I'm still having some weird problems with the way the scripts are working (when cardmgr runs network stop, it runs /etc/init.d/net.eth1 stop, which works fine when I executed, and even succeeds in shuttdown the services when cardmgr runs it, but when run through cardmgr, doesn't successfully show itself as stopped, so that when the card is inserted again, it won't restart), and I can't get ACPI working right, but that's all saved for a thread on the laptop boards.

My best guess is that the pcmcia-cs i82365 drivers might not have worked entirely correctly with my hardware, inspite of the fact that other cards worked Ok. But ultimately, I don't really know. The kernel drivers just happen to work, and the pcmcia-cs ones don't. Time to update some of the guides?

Anyway... thanks everyone for their help, both here and over on the various #gentoo-something IRC channels.

Reformist · Guru Joined: 06 Oct 2002 Posts: 323

Well.. I have no onboard lan on my laptop, and have a Netgear FA311. I have the same problems as posted above, same lockup with cardmanager -f.

Very discouraging - I'm using 1.4.rc2
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grishnav · n00b Joined: 09 Feb 2003 Posts: 42

Robelix · Posted: Fri Feb 14, 2003 7:04 pm Post subject:

I also had similar problems with my laptop and thought for some time that it was pcmcia - but it was apm. With the "use cpu idle calls" option turned off I had no more system freezes.
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Reformist · Guru Joined: 06 Oct 2002 Posts: 323

"Use CPU Item calls"? Is that a bios setting? if it is a kernel setting, I can make no use of it, because I cannot even get past the first 10 lines of the install guide.

Unfortunately my bios sucks and has absolutely no options to set except for the boot order - that's HP for you.

I'm running an HP xf328 pavillion, which is an athlon XP 1800... I currently have windows XP running on it, with a netgear MA401 wireless PC card, 11Mbps, 16 bit. I can skip running cardmgr -f and just "modprobe orinoco" to get the module loaded for inet access, but net-setup eth0 or dhcpcd yield no results. I have no error message when trying to set up my network, I just never get assigned an ip address as repoted by ifconfig -a, and of course cannot ping anything.

My network consists of a linksys BEFSR41 router and a WAP11 wireless access point, which work and connect to comcast. My router gives out IP's by dhcp.

I thought I read somewhere that loading the orinoco module will do nothing for me unless cardmgr is running - is that true? If it is true, then that is the first problem (which seems unsolveable) that I need to take care of. If I can get my network card supported without loading cardmgr, then I should be able to circumvent it since it keeps crashing and just try and get internet access, and install pcmcia-cs.

Oi!
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-Phil Crosby

Robelix · Posted: Sat Feb 15, 2003 1:23 pm Post subject:

Sorry, if I was not clear - I was in a hurry writing it, but today I've got enough time.

1) It's a kernel option - In "General Setup" in the section "Advanced Power Management BIOS Support". Its exact name is "Make CPU Idle calls when idle". Turning it on caused my system to freeze completely, this happened very often but not always while loading the pcmcia modules. It seems to be diabled in the boot-cd-kernel (at least the 1.2-stage1 I used) since I never had these troubles when booting the cd.

2) The cardmgr is a tool that looks what's happening in the pcmcia slots and loads or unloads the modules for inserted or ejected cards. If you load all modules by hand it will work without cardmgr as long as you don't eject the card.
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