laptop w/pcmcia 802.11b card won't boot
 

I have just installed the new fedora core on my Sotec 3120 laptop, for those interested I had to use "linux nofb nousb" to get the installer to boot but afterwards the install went fine.

After the first reboot I get errors. When it tries to load my wireless NIC (eth1), it complains about not finding the orinoco_cs module (of course, because pcmcia isn't loaded), it then proceeds to hang when trying to load pcmcia.

I have a Netgear MA401 wireless card, which I know is not the easiest to configure (with other distros I've installed), and I know my laptop uses ACPI which makes things even worse. I have read alot of partial threads all over from people with similar problems or partially similar (acpi, pcmcia) problems, but I haven't really found a conclusive fix.

I would really like to get fedora running on my laptop, and any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Did you get your Netgear MA401 working before on other distros?

yes

I had it working with Gentoo ... but that required a kernel compile with patched drivers and a few other tricks.

It also works out of the box with knoppix.

first thing to do is remove the "alias eth1 orinoco_cs" line from /etc/modules.conf (if it exists) and see if the boot gets further, although I believe usually in this case there should be something displayed about "delaying initialization" when it's attempted before pcmcia is loaded, so that probably won't get you any further in the boot.

When this works with knoppix, is acpi being enabled by knoppix? or do you boot with acpi=off and/or noapic?, in other words, can you rule out acpi being the problem here because it's "on" and working with knoppix? If you're not sure whether it's on/off, see if something exists under /proc for acpi and is not empty.

Similar to previous problems I have seen
 

Sound like the same problem I have been having with a Presario 2110 laptop. You might check Compaq Presario 21XX's on TuxMobile. Have tried Mandrake, RH, Gentoo. Usually got PCMCIA netgear Wireless working after a couple days dorking around. Going to try Fedora tonight. It uses a Yenta PCMCIA socket.

You can change the order in which the POMCIA loads by going into /etc/rc5d or whatever won you boot to) and changing number the S20pcmcia or k45pcmcia or whatever to a number just lower than the network S08network entry, so then the PCMCIA will load first.

PCMCIA seems that it can be pretty picky about IRQ's. You might try excluding all irq numbers except for the one where you want it to go (5 maybe?) in /etc/pcmcia/config.opts.

As for the PCMCIA hanging, most successful solutions I have seen involve 1. removing kernel-pcmcia-cs, installing new pmcmcia-cs from source (from Sourceforge) and recompiling your kernel, setting PCMCIA to a module.


I am going to try fedora tonight. hopefully, I will get to a point where I wil know if one of the solutions above works. good luck.

Re: laptop w/pcmcia 802.11b card won't boot
 

Mandrake 9.2 seems to have good acpi laptop support, and I've heard a few Mandrake success stories with the Sotec 3120 and 3123, but if you're committed to Fedora, I know that doesn't help much.

Have you tried this fix for the PCMCIA problem?

BookMaven528