I installed Mandrake 10 the other day and I cannot get it to recognize my Linksys PCMCIA card. Mandrake 9 and 9.1 never had a problem with it.

Is there something extra I need to download and install on the system to get this to work? If I have the card in when I do the intall, Linux asks for an extra Driver Floppy when setting up the PCMCIA.

Thanks for any help.

Gregg

What type of Linksys PCMCIA?
We need more info before we can help.

You might be looking to the blind for leadership here, but I just got my Linksys Ver 3 Instant Wireless PC Card working under Mandrake 10. It was a lot harder than I thought it would be...

In the end, the two things that were most important were
- making sure the correct modules were loaded and
- that the file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 had the correct entries in it.

I gave up trying to use the 'drake 10 configurators - they looked very user friendly, but gave me no joy.

First off, try tailing /var/log/syslog and pulling out and plugging in your card - you should see some messages printed in there when you plug in as the kernel tries to talk to your card. If you see one of the last few messages saying something like 'not connected' I think it means the kernel can see the card, but your network settings are not right.

In the end it was this guide that finally got me up and running.

http://www-scf.usc.edu/~sergior/tuto...-wireless.html

Good luck

Oops - I forgot to say, one of the probs that really bugged me was the yenta_socket module not loading. I think it needs to be loaded quite early on in the boot sequence, as it seems to be used by the pcmcia service to watch your card slots.

Don't know how mine got messed up, but I fixed it by putting yenta_socket in /etc/modprobe.preload, which gets used by the kernel which 'drake 10 uses.

I was (and still am) having problems with my LinkSys card when I installed Mandrake 10.0. I haven't found the cause of the problem yet, but I have found some work-arounds. Like you, my card worked without problems under Mandrake 9.2.

One problem that I was having was that every other time I booted my laptop the hardware detection program (Kudzu, I believe) would uninstall the LinkSys drivers, claiming that the hardware had been removed. I fixed this problem by changing my kernel from the 2.6 version to the 2.4 version. Now, the LinkSys card is detected at boot, the PCMCIA drivers are all correctly loaded and I am able to get the LinkSys card to work, but not until...

The other problem I was having is that even after running the DrakWhatever tool to configure the card, when I would run the iwconfig command, it would show the ESSID field as being "" (an empty string) and the card would not connect to my wireless access point. I could go in and set the ESSID to the correct value using the iwcconfig command and everything would begin to work correctly until I rebooted, then I would have to reset the ESSID string. I found an easier (less typing) solution was to enter the command "ifup eth1" as root at the command prompt and everything would get configured correctly.

When Mandrake 10.0 starts up it runs the script /etc/init.d/network to start all the network connections. When it comes to the LinkSys card it attempts to configure it by running the command "network start eth1", but for some reason it's not fetching the setup values correctly from the ifcfg-eth1 file. When I looked at the output of the /var/log/messages file, I could see where the system attempted to connect to the AP, but because the ESSID string is not being set it is unable to make a connection.

So, for PCMCIA hardware related problems, try installing and booting the laptop using the 2.4 kernel that came with the Mandrake 10.0 release.

After the Laptop is up, and you have the little green lights blinking run the command iwconfig to see how your card is configured. If you see that the ESSID value is not being set, place the correct value in the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ethX file and run the command ifup ethX (replace ethX with eth0 or eth1 depending on which connection you have configured as you wireless connection). You can set these values by using the drak network tool. Rerun the iwconfig command and verify the values are now set to what they should be.

Something else that may help you in your respective quests...

As far as the boot sequence asking you to intervene to sort out your cards, I just cancelled this each time, on the assumption that it then wont change my config, and I don't want my config changed if I can see the kernel talking to the card in /var/log/syslog.

I gave up trying to use the 'drake 10 configurator and have now got my card working reasonably well by hand-crafting my /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 script.

Assuming that you're actually talking to the card, you could try something like this. Note that I use a static IP and DNS servers. You may also need to edit /etc/sysconfig/network to set your gateway.

If you're wondering what the fsck all these scripts actually do, I found out that there's a really handy file

/usr/shared/docs/initscripts-<version>/sysconfig.txt

which explains a lot and is something I wish someone had told me about a long time ago.

Anyway, here's mine:

DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=static
IPADDR=10.0.1.151
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
NETWORK=10.0.1.0
BROADCAST=10.0.1.255
ONBOOT=yes
HWADDR=00:06:25:17:64:14
MII_NOT_SUPPORTED=no
WIRELESS_MODE=Managed
WIRELESS_ESSID=PUFF01
WIRELESS_ENC_KEY=12345678901234567890123456
PEER_DNS=yes
DNS1=212.23.8.1
DNS2=212.23.8.6

Try playing with iwconfig (read the man page) until you get it working, then put the values you use with iwconfig into your ifcfg-eth0 file.