PCMCIA advise for buying new laptop

pappsynz · 05-09-2005, 09:08 AM

Hi there,

I'm about to buy a new laptop, and a major for me is ease of Linux use with PCMCIA. One of the guys at work has been tearing his hair out over his Sony Viao and the Cardbus and I haven't got that much hair left to lose!

I've had a read through some of old threads that are relevant and it looks like the Dells and the Acers are ok but the Compaq's and HP's are rubbish. I kinda need to be a bit more specific with the PCMCIA thing though, so here is my posting ;-) Any horror stories?

Cheers,
Ben

datadriven · 05-09-2005, 10:07 PM

I have a Compaq R3000z, which overall is a pretty good laptop, but the pcmcia does not work. I ended up using a Netgear MA111, which is a usb wireless device.

thunderweasel · 05-10-2005, 07:18 AM

I run Mandrake 10.1 on my Dell Inspiron 500m, and PCMCIA works just dandy. Auto detection and all that jazz, just like Windows.

PeteBourner · 05-10-2005, 09:14 AM

I've got a Dell SmartPC 250N (aka SmartStep in the US of A), and my Netgear WG511T wifi card works perfectly.

toyg · 05-10-2005, 09:41 AM

My experiences with HP laptops have been good so far, now I'm on a Pavilion ze5602 and it works perfectly.

I'd be more careful about which distribution and CARD you want to use. I.E. I was very lucky with a Netgear WG511 "first generation", less so with the infamous same model but chipset v.3 "Made in China", and had to resort to ndiswrapper (eventually all ok though). Also, PCMCIA support in Debian-based distributions IMHO is as good as Mandrake's, and both are much better than Slackware -- just my 2 cents, eh.

masonm · 05-11-2005, 10:28 PM

PCMCIA works fine on my Compaq Armada.

audiorevolution · 05-12-2005, 11:52 PM

I'm running Kubuntu 5.04 on an old Apple PowerBook G3 ('Pismo') 500. Ubuntu recognized my Linksys PCMCIA card automatically upon installation. Before, however, I tried a netinst of Debian 3.0r5 PPC, and my card was not recognized, so I never could install the entire os. I ran YellowDog Linux for awhile, and had to configure the driver for my card (I believe I used the "raylink" driver provided with the distro), but that ended up working well.

IneedAuserName · 05-13-2005, 09:11 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by audiorevolution
I'm running Kubuntu 5.04 on an old Apple PowerBook G3 ('Pismo') 500. Ubuntu recognized my Linksys PCMCIA card automatically upon installation. Before, however, I tried a netinst of Debian 3.0r5 PPC, and my card was not recognized, so I never could install the entire os. I ran YellowDog Linux for awhile, and had to configure the driver for my card (I believe I used the "raylink" driver provided with the distro), but that ended up working well.

Would Ubunutu recognize the same Linksys card?

Can you post the specific card?

mcgrew · 05-14-2005, 04:14 AM

I recomend an Intel Centrino or anthing with a built-in intel ipw2100 or ipw2200 wireless card, maybe some other intel cards. Intel has developed (source) drivers for this card which work perfectly on my Toshiba Satellite M35X(ipw2200).

I use Gentoo at present, but I have used FC3 on this same machine and it worked just as well.

As for PCMCIA, I haven't used it yet (unless the card is connected to that internally?).

audiorevolution · 05-14-2005, 07:56 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by IneedAuserName
Would Ubunutu recognize the same Linksys card?

Can you post the specific card?

No problem. It's WPC11v3. You a fellow PPCLinuxer?