trouble detecting Xircom pcmcia ethernet card

[pibion]

Hello,

Except for recognizing my ethernet card, Puppy seems to run great on my old Sony Vaio.

But internet is important to me, so ...

I've tried using the network/ethernet wizard, and I've tried installing drivers. All the drivers have installed correctly, but I still get a "no active ethernet device detected" message. I haven't tried *all* the drivers, just the "xirc***" with a pcmcia designation and also a few other pcmcia drivers. I also haven't installed a driver and then rebooted - right now I'm running from a livecd, so I'm assuming any changes I make won't be there upon reboot.

I've tried the wireless wizard, and it sees my xircom in eth1, though of course when I tell it to look for wireless networks is fails.

I've also taken a look at some of the xircom modem how-to pages, but they seem to be modem specific, and this xircom is just an ethernet card - it doesn't have a phone jack.

The card really does look inactive - the "power on" light isn't even on, let alone the "recieving packets" light. But the card still works if I boot into windows. Booting into windows isn't something I ever want to do on that computer again, though, so any ideas on how to get the xircom working would be great.

Thanks for your help,
Amy

[norsiwel]

I have a Xircom ethernet card and modem combo, to use it I had to modprobe xircom_cb, then run the ethernet wizard, after the first time it was automatically recognized and with wvdial even the modem worked, hope this helps, good luck.

[pibion]

Wow, yeah, that worked like a charm.

Thanks!

I'm still having problems, though, with my internet settings "sticking" across reboots - at first I chalked this up to puppy not being able to save anything, but now it's installed on my hard drive and can write all the files it wants. Did you have to do anything special to make your settings permanent or run every boot-up?

Thanks again for your help,
Amy

[pibion]

Never mind - I followed the wireless people's advice and added

modprobe xircom_cb
ifconfig eth0 up
dhcpcd eth0

to my /etc/rc.d/rc.local

and that seems to work, though I haven't yet tried it with an unplugged ethernet cable. Surely the ifconfig will catch that case, right? No need to test it

[norsiwel]

My memory is not the greatest, but I think what I did was run the network wizard and choose the select custom driver option, then typed in xircom_cb in the window it provided, then it was saved into puppy's config files and it worked on boot, but I'm not using that system anymore and it's been a few months, I'm sure hand editing the config files would work too.