Greetings,
Originally had pcmcia / orinoco support compiled in the driver... with 2.4.20 (everything was working great with pcmcia and wifi) and recently decided to use as modules so during recompiliation in xconfig I changed from compiling in kernel to use in modules:
[PCMCIA/ Cardbus support]
Hermes chipset 802.11b support
[Wireless PCMCIA Cards support]
Hermes PCMCIA card support

[PCMCIA network device support]
NE2000 compatible PCMCIA support
AT&T / Lucent / Waveland wireless support

during make zimage/ bzImage
it errors out with
"ld: cannot open drivers/char/pcmcia/pcmcia_char.o"
"make: *** [vmlinux] Error 1"

... is this because in xconfig I said yes to PCMCIA wireless lan ?
I did a search on google and I have read of buggy source trees, though 2.4.20 is said to be stable so I am guessing it something I am crossing in xconfig...

I even rm'd my current /usr/src/linux source tree and downloaded a new one from kernel.org decompressed and rebuilt and got the same error...

Thanks for your help I will update if I find something along the way...

I have seen similar problems with other drivers I have attempted to enable, either kernel build or as modules. I reviewed the makefile for the object file in question and the source files are present for the 2.4.20 kernel. It has been my experience that the make system is not processing the directory. In your case, since it is the drivers/char/pcmcia device tree, it is most likely something else needs to be enabled to process the parent directory (drivers/char). So you might try enabling some generic devices that are not specificly pcmcia related, like the Generic/Standard serial device support.

Hope it helps.

Thanks again Excalibur!
Last night I read something somewhat similar here:
http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/lin...01.0/1233.html
I will fiddle more with xconfig and try out these suggestions, and will of course post any positive findings.

If I am understanding the context of what you posted corectly, then the issue could be that pcmcia support and all pcmcia devices will need to be module or kernel built. But not some of both. Makes sense, but kind of difficult when changing. The pcmcia devices are spread out all through the kernel config. In addition to the parent device support might also be modules or kernel built as well.

My experience was mainly with scsi support drivers, but I didn't think modules had anything to do with the issue because I had disabled modules.

Good luck, gives me a headache trying to comprehend it. Sounds like kernel builds may be hit or miss for a while.

Ok after beating my head for half a Sunday on this I have come to a pleasant resolve

1] I created a config file (with make xconfig) that had NO pcmcia support

2 I recompiled the kernel successfully without pcmcia support, where previously it was not compiling because I was trying to modularize the pcmcia support.

3 I created a config file based off 1's config file (noted above) and just added PCMCIA support modularized and nothing more, saved config file and recompiled the kernel... success no errors at all!

4 I noticed that I was previously not running make modules_install in my kernel compiliation process thus I was missing /lib/modules/2.4.20 which was no good for me in what I needed to do in patching the modules... so I added this step after searching more of the forums (this step was not documented in the slack essentials book online at slackware.com, nor in the oreilly's running linux ... so now my kernel compiliation process looks like this::::

a. cd /usr/src/linux
b. make mrproper
c. make xconfig (x rocks)
d. make dep
e. make clean
f. make zImage (always hoping to have a smaller kernel)
g. make bzImage (because my kernel is too big)
h. make modules
i. make modules_install

then i have created a test.bsh since i seem to be compiling the kernel at least around 20 times a day in my current experimental stage ... which is:
... so now i feel this issue has been resolved!!! Thanks again Excalibur, hopefully my information will help others that travel this path!