Hi All,

I'm trying to make use of an old piece of kit: a Gateway2000 Solo 2200 laptop.
I've got a Pentium 150MMX with something like 24Mb RAM.
It has one drive bay, so I get either a CDROM or a floppy, not both. No USB. CD drive won't read rewriteable disks. So getting stuff on here is tricky.

The real problem is the network. No on-board ethernet, so I have PCMCIA: a 3Com 3C589 card.
That ought to be fine, but the PCMCIA bridge is a Cirrus Logic 6729 - lspci says Cirrus Logic CL 6279 (rev ee), and getting kernel support for that has been interesting. Most of the standard distros don't support it out of the box, and the usual suspects for modules (i82365, i82092, PCIC) don't work.

Well I looked up new kernels, and 2.6.10 has support for a "PD6729" PCMCIA chipset, which sounds about right. I made a set of ISOs for Slackware 10.1 (happened to be on Linux Format cover DVD recently) which claimed 2.6.10 kernel (although it's optional...) and installed that.

This is as close as I've ever got to making this laptop network: I have a good set of modules in lsmod (pd6729, pcmcia, pcmcia_core, 3c589_cs) and ifconfig is actually configuring the card so I get good values for the network address and everything after I used netconfig.

But I can't get any response from the network. Pinging anything gives me a "Destination Host Unreachable" error.
Nothing else on the network finds the laptop either.

I checked hardware (cables, routers and stuff seem to work if something else is plugged in).
I've got a green light on the ethernet adapter, and on the hub at the other end of the cable.

This looks like the hardware support is still not right, but maybe there's a tweak I need to make - anyone else know anything?