PCMCIA CardBus Ethernet adaptor 10/100 doesnt work

[Hein]

Totally new with Linux. But Puppy runs very well on my old Toshiba Satellite laptop!
I only can't get the PCMCIA card working. This card enables me to connect the laptop to my router (wired, UTP-cable). Windows didn't have that problem but is too slow for this little dinosaur. I tried all PCMCIA drivers listed in the setup, one by one, but the activity led's remain dark. What should I do? The brand of the PCMCIA card says to be "Argosy", EN-235 (I bought it second hand, no manual, made in Taiwan). Thanks for your help!

[Dougal]

There are another two pcmcia modules, that aren't listed in rc.modules, but should be auto-loaded according to their pci-numbers.

You can look in /lib/modules/modules.dep.2.6.18.1 for "/pcmcia/" and se what they are.

If you can post here the output of "elspci -l" I could try and find out what the problem is.

[Hein]

Hi,
elspci -l gives the following list:

00:0b.0 00310 1033:0035 <ohci_hcd>
00:04.0 030000 102C:00E5 <>
00:02.1 060700 1179:060F <yenta_cardbus>
00:02.0 060700 1179:060F <yenta_cardbus>
00:00.0 060000 1179:0601 <>

Thanks for you help

Hein

[Dougal]

I'll have a look at that info, but note that you do have the yenta_cardbus module loaded, so something was detected...

You might want to have a look in /tmp/bootsysinit.log, to see if there were any error messages when the cardbus manager was started.

[Hein]

Hi Dougal,

The messages were..

Yenta socket 27546 2
rsrc nonstatic 12912 1 yenta socket
Running PMCIA cardmgr program...
cardmrg [1859] watching 2 sockets
FATAL: Module chips not found.

Hmmmm, can you make something out of this?

Kind regards,

Hein

[Dougal]

Hmm.

I thought I found the problem, that the cardmanager wasn't started at all, but maybe not...

I'll try and look at the cardmgr script and see what I find.

[Dougal]

OK, I found a possible cause of problems with pcmcia, but it's not necessarily what you're suffering from...

In any case, you should try and look at /var/run/stab, see if there's anything interesting in there.

Ok, now the problem: by default, the lists of kernel modules are kept in /lib/modules/`uname -r`.
Those lists are generated by the kernel whenever you run "depmod -a".
Those lists contain only the modules found in that directory, i.e. only modules that were already modprobed and copied into your pup_save file.

This means that maybe the cardmgr won't know which modules to load, since it doesn't have the full lists of modules -- found in the zdrv and also in /lib/modules and renamed with the kernel version added to them (example: /lib/modules/modules.dep.2.6.18.1 ).

There is an option of running the cardmgr with a "modules path", but it will still probably look for the list names without the kernel-version...

So you could try and create links to the files in /lib/modules, that don't have the kernel version in them.
Example: in a Rox window, right click on /lib/modules/modules.dep.2.6.18.1, select "link" and then delete the ".2.6.18.1" from the end of the name.

One more little thing: /lib/modules doesn't contain all the module info lists (modules.alias...), so you still might be missing something.
Solution: just mount the zdrv and copy the files from it:

Code: Select all

mount -o loop /where/it/is/zdrv_216.sfs /mnt/data
cp /mnt/data/lib/modules/2.6.18.1/modules.* /lib/modules/
umount /mnt/data

Now, you'll need to change rc.modules to use those files:

Code: Select all

echo "Running PCMCIA cardmgr program..."
    /sbin/cardmgr -m /lib/modules

Reboot and see what happens... as I said, it might not be the problem in your case...