VIA USB, kudzu, and linksys NIC....
 

Hello,

I am desperately trying to get **ANY** kind of network connection on my Compaq Presario 1210us notebook (850MHz Duron, 20GB HD, 128MB RAM).

On other machines in the past, I usually used Mandrake. I recently got this notebook, and tried to install linux on it. The setup would hang. I found out that it was a usb conflict (seems common among compaq notebooks w/ VIA chipsets). I did the 'linux noauto' at the start of setup, and it installed fine (I had to disable usb and kudzu from automatically starting).

Unfortunately, I cannot get my internal NIC to detect. I was told that conexant products didn't work very well with linux (usually not at all), so I purchased a linksys pcm200 nic. It works great in windows, but it won't detect just as the 1st card.

I've tried installing redhat 7.2, and I do a 'linux nousb' at the start of setup, the nic activates (it finds the card, chirps as the card is activated, and the NIC's indicator lights all come on). Unfortunately, when the machine reboots, setup hangs when kudzu starts.

I tried setting up lilo and passing nousb to the kernel, but if I install lilo, the machine won't boot (it hangs with a blinking cursor). I installed it with grub, got to a command prompt and typed 'linux nousb' and it hung at the same spot.

I read somewhere that disabling PnP in the bios will sometimes fix the problem. Unfortunately, I have a Phoenix BIOS that only lets me change the boot pwd, sys clock and bood device order.

I even tried going back to mandrake 8.1 and tried compiling the modules manually, but nothing worked. Unfortunately, I have no idea what to do next. I read somewhere that you can put 'usb=noprobe' somewhere, perhaps a kudzu config file?

The way I see it, 'linux nousb' is a kernel issue, and has nothing to do with kudzu. It also seems apparent that pcmcia services necessary for the NIC require kudzu, which gives it the 'hotswap' functionality. Can I remove kudzu (how??) or is there a parameter I can pass to kudzu to disable usb probing?

Any suggestions?

Jason

...fixed
 

Okay, I fixed the problem. All I had to do was boot off a boot floppy made from the pcmcia floppy image on the installation cd.

I can't believe I didn't think of that. Oh well.

The quickest and dirtiest way to stop the hanging if it is indeed USB:

Go into /lib/modules/2.4.x/, find all of the USB mods, and just mv the lot of them somewhere else. You might also want to recompile the kernel and just drop all USB support.

As far as pcmcia is concerned, I'm kinda confused, which distro is it running now?

Luck,

Finegan

I've got the USB thing figured out I think. I just do 'linux noauto' at startup of setup. Then I disable the usb and kudzu services from starting automatically.

I'm using Mandrake 8.x.

Thanks.

The linksys nic works in 8.1 but not in 8.2 (I posted a thread in networking forum).