Installing 3c575-tx cardbus pc card onto RedHat 6.2 with DELL Latitude CPi
 

Hi everyone,

I am just a new kid in the linux arena and would appreciate some help from you linux gurus.
I have tried installing redhat 6.2 onto my DELL Latitude CPi but it doesn't recognize the 3Com 3c575-tx PC Card and the modem (3Com 56K PC Card modem 3ccm156) cannot be detected as well.
I did some search on the web and found some kind of hints but because I am too green in unix, I could not really follow up and I would like to have a step-by-step guide to doing that.

Many thanks in advance.

JL

Check the Howtos
 

Sorry but no step by step in linux for every problem. Lot of long hours of reading and following instructions will get you closer to the end of the cold dark endless tunnel. Or at least you will learn a lot about how it all works.

you need to go to redhat website to see if your cards are supported, so if they are supported, I will tell you how to configure them ok Phil

when you go there, look for hardware; you will see a list of hardware that support by redhat
the site is www.redhat.com

It just so happens that I run RHAT 6.2 and have a PCMCIA network card. It's a generic cardbus card that took a little work the first time I installed it.

I wrote an article about the configuration on LinuxOrbit.com:

http://www.linuxorbit.com/features/pcmcia.php3

Let me know if this helps.

Thank you GonzoJohn for your article.

After reading through your article, it allows me to find out what was going on when the cardmgr scans the 2 pcmcia sockets. Surprisingly, contrary to what the DELL and RedHat support told me, cardmgr actually recognizes the cards (including the modem) and executes the drivers for it.
However, I notice that during the installation process, it did not actually bring up the host and ip address screen for you to enter the relevant information and so after the 1st boot, eth0 was inactive.

I went back to the log and found the following lines:
cardmgr[397]: executing: './network start eth0'
cardmgr[397]: executing: + usage: ifup <device name>
cardmgr[397]: start cmd exited with status 1

and so I believe something was wrong. Since I don't know what 'status 1' means, I just went into X-Windows and use netcfg (if it doesn't work, use netconfig) to set the ip address and everything and it works perfectly! So, the installation was very straightforward but the main thing is you just have to be persistent.

Just for your information, I am running RedHat 6.2 on:
DELL Latitude CP233ST
3Com 3C575-TX CardBus

One thing though: there is a bit of a fiddling in configuring the monitor of the laptop. I cannot use the LCD 800x600 (unlike other DELL laptop models). You have to choose DELL super VGA (or other brand of VGA I reckon) and configure it manually - choose 2mb as the video memory and no clockset or something - the last thing is to choose 8-bit 800x600, others won't work.