skolelinux and recognizing pcmcia card on an old laptop
 

Hi there,
I have been trying for quite some time to revive an old laptop (Toshiba Satellite PII class) with a Linux system. After kissing many frogs, I think I finally found my princess, an individual install of skolelinux. It seems to fully utilize all my hardware and even runs videos from a USB stick smoothly...

However, it doesn't seem to recognize my pcmcia card.
Ironically, recognizing my pcmcia card has never been an issue with any of my rejected light distros. Any advice? To further complicate matters, I can't seem to edit anything in /etc/network/interfaces, as it says I have no permissions. I am the only user (with admin properties). If I try to log in as ROOT, it says ROOT logins are not permitted.

Any help appreciated for this noob. Thanks!

Check your BIOS on the laptop to see if the PCMCIA has different modes that it can run in. If there is another mode (PCIC or Cardbus) try that and see if it works. It may not be loading the modules on boot which would cause this.

In order to get permissions as the root user you need to either use 'su -' (yes the - is there on purpose as some distributions need this) or sudo. If it does use sudo then you can do 'sudo vim /etc/network/interfaces' which will ask you for a password where you will type in your user password and continue to edit it. Be sure to replace 'vim' with a different editor if you're not comfortable with using that one.

Thanks for the BIOS advice. I tried both Cardbus/16bit and PCIC. None worked, and with PCIC the lights didn't even turn on. No matter what selection the system info says no PCIMIA card detected.

Oddly enough I used a web install for this OS. I have no idea why it wouldn't be recognizing the card now.

Thanks again, why do you (or anyone else) think I should try next to get skolelinux to recognize my card?

With the system booted up login as root and try loading the yenta socket model (a lot of Toshiba laptops use this to access PCMCIA cards). To load this module run 'modprobe yenta_socket' and then plug in your PCMCIA card and see if it is detected by typing 'dmesg'. If it is detected you will see some new messages at the end there with some information about the hardware being plugged in and a kernel module hopefully being loaded for the adapter.

In the Shell Konsole I entered "sudo -vim /etc/network/interfaces"

i was then asked for a password. I entered it and then declared that my username "is not in the sudoers file". When I typed it again nothing happened. yargh, I didn't set up any other accounts! And under security manager I'm listed as admin,user. I guess this has largely turned into a skolelinux OS permissions problem. Thanks again for your continued attention I appreciate it.



edit: also when googling around for this problem I found this


If you have a laptop with an onboard NIC, and you start it without the
cable plugged in, the computer will likely "hang" for a while (trying to
configure the network), then time out. To fix this you need to edit the
file /etc/network/interfaces, and comment out the line

auto eth0

The situation is similar if you have a pcmcia card (even with the cable
plugged in), because the pcmcia card is not brought up until after the
network is brought up. Commenting out the "auto eth0" line will also help
in this case.

course I can't try it due to my permissions problem.

Not to unnecessarily bump a thread like this, but anyone have any new input?

I suppose it is now a "how do I get permissions" question before a "why won't my pcmcia be recognized" question. I can't seem to find any specialized skolelinux support forums, but if anyone knows them I would like to hear it to. THanks in advance.