I am Noob.... I mean NOOB i just got mandrake to check it out...i installed on my laptop after about 20 hours and 3 reinstals i got it up and running.. i have about 1 million questions so i will start with one.

i need drivrs for intel etherexpress pro/100 mobile adapter 32 bit cardbus(pcmcia).. cant find em anywhere... i read that linux supports most ethernet cards other than exotics... dont think that intel is exotic... i am trying to sett up this linux machine to my network so i can access the internet through my lan which i have ICS(internet connection sharing) on. any help or suggestions please email me or reply to this post

my email is: nyckrook@aol.com thank you: :smash:

from a command prompt, try this:

'lsmod'

If there is an entry for 'xirc2ps_cs', then that's probably the driver for the Nic, already loaded. If your LAN hands out IPs via dhcp, try:

'ifconfig eth0 up'
'dhcpcd eth0'

If you use statics...

'ifconfig eth0 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx up'
Edit /etc/resolv.conf with the IP's of your nameservers in the following format:

nameserver xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

lastly, the machine will need a gateway, probably your windows box's IP.

route add default gw xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

This is the hand hack way to do... of course there are scripts to do it for you, but its a pain to edit all of those and then have it not work... plus their output when they fail is useless for debugging.

All of that probably won't work all in one shot, but post back what else happens... g'luck.

Cheers,

Finegan

ok first i want to thank you for responding and for your help

ok i loaded mandrake on a workstation i had sitting around... everything working fine it found my nic and is working properly... i can access the internet because of my ICS...

ok my goal has been reached now i can play with this OS and find out what i can do with it... (my goal is to run a linux server for my setup) first i need to learn this OS before i can do that.

but, always a but, now i want to figure this lappy problem... i have installed mandrake on 2 lappys i have... but the 2 network adapters i have for the lappys are the same exact ones... when i ran the networking wizard at install and after the install i choose my network adapter but the it does not give me the choice for a mobile adapter

so what i think is it thinks its a pci or isa card and not a pcmcia card...

ok i tried your suggestion and it stated the following

"bash: ismod: command not found"

i looked in the control center under hardware and it is not showing a network device

anther question when you say from command promt you mean terminal right... because i see SHELL, RXvt, TERMINAL 9super user mode) just want to be 100% clear so i am sure in what im doing

looking forward to your reply and thanks again for the help

Command line, terminal, yeah, that thing. If you really want to get hardcore, hit Alt+ctrl+F1: That's one of 6 virtual terms (F1-F6). To get back to X-Windows, alt+F7.

Okay... whew, you said the magic words: "I want to actually learn this OS".

First off, not ismod, lsmod, 'L'. Bummer... anyway, and since me spewing off senseless commands isn't that much fun. 'lsmod' lists all of the modules currently loaded into the kernel. Modules are a nifty way to make drivers for certain devices plug and play. Technically anything that is a module could be compiled directly into the kernel, but as Mandrake doesn't know what your hardware is like, you get a rather slim kernel and a mountain of modules.

The first ethernet device found by the kernel, by default, is eth0 (well... almost always), 'ifconfig' is the command that will manually bring up the device, assign it an IP and a subnet mask, blah blah blah...

'dhcpcd' Is the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol Client Daemon... and wow was that a keyboard full. The big word here is client. You could run 'dhcpd' off of that machine, which refers to the actual server daemon that would hand out IP addresses.

Okay... der, the laptops. Honestly the best way to know if the machine is recognizing and loading drivers for that card is the noises it makes. Yeah, sounds like voodoo, but its built into pcmcia-cs. Pull the card while the machine is running and re-insert it. You should hear 2 tones. The first is the machine having found the card's existence, the second is it trying to load the driver. If the second tone is much like the first, a high pithed beep, then it loaded the module, probably: xirc2ps_cs. If the second tone was a low-pitched 'bonk', try the command: 'dmesg'

This is a laundry list of everything the kernel detected in order as it loaded... at the end should be the NIC and why it did or didn't initialize.

The weirdest thing to get used to in Linux is the idea that all of the drivers you'll ever need are already on the machine, you just have to learn how to configure them when you're done.

Cheers,

Finegan.

I have the same network card as you. Under hardware i have an unknown pcmcia device and a DEC 21142/43 NIC. I've tried several different things and can't figure out how to get it to work. Any sugestion would be greatly appreciated.