Trouble with laptop.
 

Hi there,

I have a Toshiba Satellite 315cds running Red Hat 7.3. It's a Pentium 200mghz with 32 meg of ram. I have been running RH for two days now so I'm a newbie. The problem that I am having though is I have a NetGear FA411 PCMCIA network card and I don't know what to do to get it to work. I have spent the last two days trying unsucessfully on my own. So now I ask for any help. I don't know what to do with it, but I refuse to torture it with Win98 again.

Thanks for any help,
Nick

The FA411 is supported in the pcmcia that shipped with Redhat, its probably just a matter of sorting out how you get an IP address. Try, as root:

ifconfig -a

That'll list all the available network devices, up or down, if you have an eth0, you're fine.

Cheers,

Finegan

So, I tried the ifconfig -a but there was no etho

With the card in, what do you get from, as root:

cardctl ident

That'll give the information straight off the card, maybe its something odd.

Cheers,

Finegan

ok, So I logged in as root and typed cardctrl ident, and it gave me "bash: cardctrl: cammand not found".

cardctl, no "r"

Cheers,

Finegan

Sorry, I did cardctl ident and I got "no pcmcia driver in /proc/devices". I don't know much about linux, but I'm sure that is not good. How do I get pcmcia drivers, I figured that they would be installed during the installation.

Wow, okay...RedHat 7.3... first lets see if you installed pcmcia. If you have a directory called /etc/pcmcia, then you're probably fine, try:

lsmod

and we'll see if you even have any of the base pcmcia bus modules loaded. Offhand, while you were installing, did you remember to check the machine off as a "laptop" install, or "everything"?

Cheers,

Finegan

ok,

I have the directory /etc/pcmcia. When I run lsmod I get:

Module Size Used by Not tainted
nls_iso8859-1 3456 0 (autoclean)
soundcore 6436 0 (autoclean)
binfmt_misc 7204 1
autofs 11940 0 (autoclean) (unused)
ide-cd 29856 0 (autoclean)
cdrom 33184 0 (autoclean) [ide-cd]
usb-ohci 20160 0 (unused)
usbcore 71168 1 [usb-ohci]
ext3 64448 2
jbd 47608 2 [ext3]

When I installed I chose custom installation, and when it got to the choosing packages screen, I made sure to check the laptop packages.

Thanks for your help so far :)

Nick

Try the command:

/etc/rc.d/init.d/pcmcia start

See what happens, hopefully it'll load a module called yenta_socket and then load the module for the network card driver... If you have the rest of the pcmcia goop, it should have been called on boot, weird...

Cheers,

Finegan

I ran the /etc/rc.d/init.d/pcmcia start, and I didn't get any error message, nor did I get a confirmation message of any kind, is it supposed to tell me if it did somthing?

Ok, Ignore the last post,

When I type the /etc/rc.d/init.d/pcmcia start I got a message saying: "PCIC module not defined in startup options". Linux is getting to be quite confusing.

Hmm... did the machine beep at all? If everything loaded fine it should have let out 2 nearly identical pitched beeps. If not I have to pitch around for where the heck RH puts their pcmcia set-up options so you can give it the module used for the bus... I agree, evidently RH did not build their install for 7.3 very intelligently if it didn't install the pcmcia scripts right...

gah...

Cheers,

Finegan

My machine has not beeped anytime that I have put the network card in.

Alright, this is going farther than it should have to, even the barebones knuckles to into the code distros don't require you to do this. You'll have to manually edit the configuration file:

pico /etc/rc.d/init.d/pcmcia

look for a group of lines something like:

# Should be either i82365 or tcic
PCIC=i82365
# Put socket driver timing parameters here
PCIC_OPTS=
# Put pcmcia_core options here
CORE_OPTS=
# Put cardmgr options here
CARDMGR_OPTS=

Pico is a pretty intuitive text editor, ctrl+o to save, ctrl+x to exit is about all you need to know.

That sample also came from a Slackware laptop, so its going to look similar, not identical. Use the same information, PCIC=i82365. The rest you can ignore. There is an off chance your machine is old enough to have a tcic bridge, but I'de put it at extrememly unlikely.

Then restart pcmcia again with /etc/rc.d/init.d/pcmcia start and see if it doesn't error.

Cheers,

Finegan