When starting PC Cards. I'm using the Debian-Installer for Sarge, albiet a slightly older version and was wondering if anyone else had similar problems with this notebook.

233MHz computer, 64MB Ram 3.8GB Hard-drive space. I was thinking a Debian install and a nice light window manager might be nice, but I can't get by the Detecting Hardware PC Card portion. And Live CD's won't run since I only have 64MB Ram. Is there a way around this or should I download the set of Debian CD's? And if I do that do I need all of them?

I'm guessing I'm SOL here.

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I wish I could help myself, but unfortunately I'm just not familiar with Debian. Good luck with it either way

Try the newer version of the Debian Installer. I used the rc2 version, and it works fine. You could use the CD set, but if you are going to do that, I would wait until Sarge goes stable, so that way in two or three months, you don't have a set of useless CDs

Sorry, I'm not trying to be rude.

Also I'm using RC 2 I think.... I just downloaded another copy of the CD today. It's freezing at starting PC Cards or something along those lines.

I'll try a daily build then I'll grab a full CD set. Also whatever version I grab I'll probably change apt to point to the unstable version.

daily build doesn't work, full cd works as long as I have start_pcmcia=false set.

OK. I got Debian Sarge installed fine and dandy. But I still can't get my PC-Card working. It's a Linksys Etherfast 10/100+ 56k card. PCMLM56, if the card is inserted on boot I get this message.

Starting PCMCIA services: cardmgr[1966]: watching 2 sockets
cs: IO port probe 0x0100-0x04ff: excluding 0x200-0x22f 0x388-0x38f 0x480-0x48f 0x4d0-0x4d7
cs: IO port probe 0x0c00-0x0cff: clean
cs: IO port probe 0x0a00-0x0aff: clean
cs: memory probe 0xa0000000-0xa0ffffff:

at which point it hangs.

Without the card in it starts up just fine, but the card won't work if put in later either.

Also KDE can see the card on Port 0 when it's plugged in later, but I still can't use it.

I'm pretty much a newbie with setting up this type of stuff. Never had a laptop before. any ideas on how to keep it from freezing on boot and how to get it to connect to the net?

Thanks.

Just a bump.

Hi!

How did you get by the blocking "Starting PC-Card Services..." point?

I have got a brand-new Toshiba Satellite SM30X-167 which hangs at this point too (for both, Live CD or Install CD). (The distribution actually is (K)Ubuntu, but that is more or less identical to Debian, at least for the installer.)

Is there any way to disable PC-Card detection in the Debian installer?

I have found a posting stating to use

imagename hw-detect/start_pcmcia=false

as boot parameters (where 'imagename' obviously is the name of a boot image) which works to bypass the "famous 'lock up on pcmcia detection' issue" as they say:
http :// lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2005/07/msg00366.html

I have not tried yet if installing fully works with this though.

How did you do it DuneSoldier?