ok , well i have been through hell and back with this laptop , but it's all i got and i wat it to work ... now first things first , it has no cd-rom drive and i installed Slackware 7.1 packages a and n on floppy disks to get something on here and figured i would do the rest and the upgrade through network install with the pcmcia ethernet card i have it is a D-Link DFE-690TXD , and i cannot for the life of me get the laptop to realize that it is a nic , the link/act lights on the nic light up when i plug it in so i know the pcmcia support is there .... now i found a module for this ethernet card across the net and downloaded it and put it on a floppy , which brings me to my next problem .... so some reason after the FLOPPY INSTALL the floppy drive died ... /dev/fd0 doesn't exist and nothing resembling a floppy drive is in the /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab ..... anyone think they can help?

(i put this in the hardware forums before i realized there was a laptop section and didn't know how to go about moving it , i appologize)

Ok, *grin*, the post has moved, but the question is the same:
can you still boot from the floppy drive? If so, I would recommend you go with Slackware 9.0 rather than 7.2, your card just may be supported. I have 9 installed on what I'll bet is an even older cdrom-less notebook than yours and it runs well, X included. Once you can boot from floppy, it's a matter of having another slack9 machine on the same network which has a cdrom which you can share via nfs, and is capable of compiling (if one isn't already available on the pcmcia.dsk) a module for your netcard.

forgot to add this: If another machine running slack9 isn't your cup of tea, but you do have another linux box to share a cdrom via nfs from (and you have the slack9 cd), I can compile the module for your card on one of mine and post it for download.

well i do have a RedHat 7.3 box that i am going to be wiping the hard drive off of and i plan to slap slackware 9 on it , cuz i love slackware .... and how exactly would i do a nfs connection if the pcmcia card is my only ethernet connection ... i do have a dial up modem on this thing .. it is a 28.8 and i know that is slow as hell , but i would do it if i could do a nfs connection with the dial up modem .... think i can still do it?

also , with the slackware 9.0 install.1 and instal.2 rootdisk i have always gotten I/O errors when trying to install with them , i used brand new floppies and even tried a couple different downloads of the file .... any other suggestions?

Perhaps it's time to describe the machine you're trying to install this on, eg: make/model.

IBM Thinkpad 760ed
Pentium 133mhz
32mb PC100 ram
2.1Gb hdd
28.8k dial up modem (internal)
2 pcmcia 32-bit slots
floppy drive only

i am going today to take the ethernet card back and try to get one that is more supported with linux ... but the one i have right now is a D-Link DFE-690TXD

Not sure if you want to invest in new hardware, but I thought I'd suggest it anyway. They're a bit expensive, but useful nonetheless.

PCMCIA CD-Rom

I have one of these with my laptop, and I installed Slackware 9.0 with no problems (after a little help and searching on LQ)

I would suggest a Linksys pcm100 (it's a wired 10/100 pcmcia card). I have one and it's been recognized right "out of the box" by quite a few distros.

well , i found a how-to and the modules needed for the one nic i have , so i decided to keep it and i fixed my floppy drive with a little help of a guy in irc , i used "mount -o ro -t msdos /dev/fd0 /mnt" .... thank you all for your help , i will post again if i get the nic to work

do have one question .... how do i know what pcmcia card service version i am using??? and what is a pcmcia card service version anyhow?

From a console type dmesg | grep 'Linux Kernel Card'

This will return either "Linux Kernel Card Services x.x.xx" or "Linux Kernel Card Services Kernel Version", which means you'll need to look in this file: /usr/src/linux/include/pcmcia/version.h for the version.

i don't have a /usr/src/linux ... only a /usr/src/sendmail ... and the thingy that you had me enter into the command line didn't seem to do anyhting accept go to the next line ... any ideas?

Ok, try this: grep 'Linux Kernel Card' /var/log/syslog and also /var/log/messages. As far as the /usr/src/linux business goes, that just means you don't have the kernel sources installed. Do you have a /usr/include/linux?

grep 'Linux Kernel Card' /var/log/syslog didn't print anyhitng out .... i dunno if it did anyhting or not grep 'Linux Kernel Card' /var/log/messages entered me into the next line , but i can't get a shell prompt in that console unless i reboot ...

no i odn't have /usr/include/linux

Sounds like you don't have pcmcia services installed or running at all, what does lsmod say? Do you see pcmcia_core and ds listed?

hmmm ... i dunno where exactly i would find lsmod