It's been some time since I did any work on that old laptop. I've been away on holiday and then very busy.
So this evening I tried to get my head back into configuring eth0.
I've come up with a couple of ideas and tried them to no avail. Here goes -

I read here about pcmcia configuration:
http://linux.about.com/library/cmd/blcmdl5_pcmcia.htm

and after some more reading around created /etc/modprobe.d/xircom.conf as follows:

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I meant this evening to continue exploring the installation of Slackware onto my old Dell laptop. The battery stopped working many years ago and I've been running it off the mains. This evening I plugged in the power-supply and switched on at the socket and nothing happened.

I've put a meter across the mains outlet and it's working and the plug's fuse is okay and power gets as far as the connection into the power supply, but there's no little green light coming on.

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I read in Michael Lewis's Absolute BSD that the best way to learn the system is to explore /etc/ so I decided to take a look at the files in /etc/ and see if I could find out where control of loading modules at boot time lies. I thought that finding references to `modprobe` in the files in /etc/ might give me a clue so I did:

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It's a week or so since I did anything to that laptop. I've got a working OS on it but I don't have a network connection, not to mention X or any other pretties.

First I want to get the network up and running. I know that the NIC works as I explained before, so that's not a problem. It's a Xircom Credit Card Ethernet 10/100+ Modem 56 CEM56-100

I know that the machine is connected to the pcmcia cardbus:

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I have an old laptop computer that I have had an old distribution of Fedora running on for ages. I wanted to use the laptop with QCad to create drawings of a brake van that I am helping to renovate at my local steam railway.

I could have installed QCad on the Fedora setup but it was very slow and clunky and I thought that with a more stripped down installation it might be quicker. So I decided to install Slackware 12 that I got on the DVD that came with a copy of Linux Format Magazine...