Last night I decided to try to update the kernel on my laptop from 2.4 to 2.6. Since I have very little space on my hard drive to really try saving any thing big on it I decided to just reinstall slackware 8.1 and when it got to the point that it asked for the kernel I wanted to use, I choose to load a kernel from floppy that I had load a slackware 9.1 bare.i kernel. Every thing seemed to go thru fine, the computer boots up fine and almost every thing works (even seems to be running faster). The only problem I have so far is getting my nic card to work. When the computer boots up it gives the message:

Starting PCMCIA services:
<Probing for PCIC: edit /etc/rc.d/rc.pcmcia>
cardmgr[55]: cannot access /lib/modules/2.4.22: no such file or directory
cardmgr[55]: no pcmcia driver in /proc/devices
Attempting to configure eth0 by contacting a DHCP server...
modprobe: modprobe: Can't open dependencies file /lib/modules/2.4.22/modules.dep (No such file or directory)
dhcpcd[59]: dhcpStart: ioctl SIOCGIFHWADDR: No such device

When searching thru the folders and files to try and locate the /lib/modules/2.4.22 folder I couldn't but I did find /lib/modules/2.4.18. Now I'm not sure that this is the file I need but I was unable to locate a similar file. So I guess the real question is what file do I need to edit so that modprobe will be able to locate the right drivers, and do I just need to redirect it to the /lib/modules/2.4.18 file or is there some thing different/better to try?

Also if any one could instruct me on how to copy the entire error output messages to the floppy I would gladly post it, if that would help at all.

This is not the most beautiful fix but how about you create a symlink 2.4.22 that points to 2.4.18?

This might work.. but use on your own risk.

I had a similar problem that moving to the 2.6 kernel it never detected my modules. This was because I needed to install upgrade the "module-init-tools" package. This then fixed the problem.

If I understood right, you didn't get to install 2.6 in that machine, right? What's happening is that Slack 8.1 uses kernel 2.4.18, but you used the 9.1 kernel which is 2.4.22. Then your system loads a 2.4.22 kernel searching for it's modules in /lib/modules/2.4.22 but you only have modules for your 2.4.18 kernel. The link creation will not work because modules are compiled for a single kernel (now there's that "Kernel Modules Versioning" - don't really remember the name - in kernel that *might* let you load different kernel modules) and it will give you a error message when you try to load the 2.4.18 modules. To get this to work, remove the kernel-modules package from the your system and install the same package from the 9.1 version.

hope this helps

hmm.. your right I infact did not install the 2.6 kernel like I thought I had. since that is the case I decided to go back to the original kernel and I'm going to upgrade the kernel with the proper patches. sorry I didn't check to make sure I had the right information.