xircom xe2000 pcmcia card not activating in RH9 or Fedora

I have been trying to get my Xircom xe2000 pcmcia network card working in Fedora Core and originally in RH9 without any luck. ( on a gateway laptop)
During startup when probing the network adapter I get the error “device eth0 does not seem to be present, delaying initialization “ or something to that effect. In Fedora when running /sbin/modprobe xirc2ps_cs I don’t get any response, I assume this mean there are no errors. In the interrupt table (cat /proc/interrupts) the device is listed under IRQ 3 therefore I know the computer recognizes that it is there. The pc slots are also fully functional as far as I can tell showing up in the hardware profile and also having interrupt assignments. The network card is also present in the /etc/module.conf and nothing there seems to be out of the ordinary.
Needless to say Eth0 wont activate once in the OS though the hardware is present. Has anyone else had this problem or know how to fix the problem?
Thanks,
Matt

Not familiar with the particular nic, and personally using RHEL 3, but a few suggestions that might help if we're lucky:

Does the PCMCIA support work ok?
Does 'cardctl status' return something that could be interpreted as OK ?
Does 'cardctl ident' recognise the card?
Are you sure xirc2ps_cs is the correct driver?
What happens if you try '/etc/rc.d/init.d/pcmcia restart' ?

Regards,
Geir

I've had the same exact issue with two Dell laptops with Xircom type III ethernet + modem cards. My guess is that this affects all PCMCIA ethernet users as the problem seems to be that "network" is loading before "pcmcia".

Therefore it fails to configure the network correctly. All you have to do is change the order in which the daemons are started:


cd /etc/rc5.d
mv S24pcmcia S09pcmcia


Regards,
Julian

Additionally, you should probably edit /etc/init.d/pcmcia and /etc/init.d/network.

Change the chkconfig lines to reflect the start and stop order. That way, if the user uses a GUI tool or chkconfig to disable or enable the services in the future, they'll stay in the "corrected" order.

Red Hat didn't swap this by desigh, however. They have some logic within the init scripts to detect whether hotplug is enabled, and then wait for the device to be hotplugged (i.e. starting of the pcmcia service) before starting the interface. The problem comes when the particular card isn't locaed within the (limited) PCMCIA database. It's not too difficult to add the card if you know how, but I suppose swapping the services could "solve" some problems as well (while potentially creating others).

-Rick

Absolutely. It is a quick fix that solves the problem but it is by no means am elegant solution

Originally posted by juliancoccia Therefore it fails to configure the network correctly. All you have to do is change the order in which the daemons are started: cd /etc/rc5.d mv S24pcmcia S09pcmcia [/B]

This worked for my Compaq 12xl125 laptop with a Xircom 10/100 pccard also!
Much obliged!

Hi,

I'm having this problem also with my Dell and a Xircom pcmcia NIC....

I tried the #mv S24.... S09..... (though I haven't a clue what it does)

then rebooted and it still didn't work. Should eth0 automatically be activated upon boot?

It did behave differently (I have a link light now) and I was optomistic when I selected 'Activate'
and it showed 'Detemining IP Information for eth0..."....but it hung for 20-30 seconds before
displaying ....failed. (Cannot activate network device eth0)

Is there a step I'm missing in this thread (being new to Linux) that perhaps is taken
for granted amongst veteran Linux users?

Help me - I don't wanna go back to, dare I say, MSWindows.

Thanks.