I have an old toshiba laptop (Satellite 420CDT). I would like to be able to use the PCMCIA network card that i bought for it. (Belkin 16-bit PCMCIA Network Adapter). I have recompiled the kernel four times now and am currently trying on the fifth. On such an old computer this is not a pleasant experience. I downloaded the pcmcia-cs package along with the 2.4.22 kernel source and followed the instructions that I read on Vector Linux's site (I am running vector linux 4.0 on it) After doing all of this I am reward with no PCMCIA hardware being recognized. When I run the debugging programs that came with the pcmcia-cs package I get the following error messages (output is in brackets):

test_network:

{
Socket status file (stab) not found! Is PCMCIA running?
}


test_setup:
{ ...
Using /lib/modules/2.4.22/pcmcia/pcmcia_core.o:
"Linux PCMCIA Card Services 3.2.5
options [pci] [apm]

....
ds : no socket drivers loaded

Module status:
No socket drivers are loaded.

Daemon status
/var/run/cardmgr.pid does not exist
}

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks,
JT

Did you compile PCMCIA as a module in the kernel? Have you done modprobe on it?

I did not install it as a module in the kernel because the pcmcia howto that comes with the pcmcia-cs package said not to. What is modprobe? How do I do it for pcmcia? What will it tell me?

Thanks,
JT

No, if you didn't install it as a module, you don't need to do modprobe - I was just wondering if that was the problem.

I read somewhere that Vector Linux has a few problems with PCMCIA (not bashing VL, just saying I read it). So I pulled out some old Slackware 9.1 disks and it worked right out of the box. All I had to do was edit /etc/pcmcia/network.opts to use DHCP and put in my network ip.

If anyone was having a similar problem with laptops and VL go Slack. It has the pcmcia-cs package integrated into its setup program and runs faster using less disk space on mine.

I would be interested to hear any solutions to my previous problem though (just out of curiousity)

Thanks
JT