I recently upgraded my laptop from RH8 to RH9. All in all the upgrade went well, but since the upgrade getting pcmcia to work properly has been a strugle. I have 2 pcmcia cards, the first is a 3com 3c574 ethernet card and a netgear MA401 wireless card. After the install and a rebuild of the drivers, the netgear came right up without issue. The 3com was failing however, so I decided to remove the eth0 configs in order to reinstall. Since I did this unfortunately, the PCMCIA drivers won't load during boot seemingly no matter what I do.

I clearly watch as init reports that pcmcia gets the [ OK ] during boot, but the looking at the syslog I see the following:

Apr 10 12:59:30 Q-redhat kernel: Linux Kernel Card Services 3.1.22
Apr 10 12:59:30 Q-redhat kernel: options: [pci] [cardbus] [pm]
Apr 10 12:59:30 Q-redhat kernel: ds: no socket drivers loaded!
Apr 10 12:59:30 Q-redhat kernel: unloading Kernel Card Services

Due to this, the actual cards never initialize and are in essence dead.
However, after running the following successive commands:

/sbin/insmod pcmcia_core
/sbin/insmod yenta_socket
/sbin/insmod ds
/etc/rc.d/rc3.d/S24pcmcia start
/sbin/cardmgr

Everything comes up and works great. Thus my main question is how can I get these 3 modules to properly load during boot? I can hack around with putting something in rc.local, but would rather do this properly.

Thanks in advance.

Try this for levels 3-5 and let me know if it worked.
/sbin/chkconfig --level 3 pcmcia on

unfortunately, I'd already double checked those configs, but did them again for good measure. In the boot log I get the following:
Q-redhat rc: Starting pcmcia: succeeded

And in the system log I get the following:

Apr 12 08:59:34 Q-redhat kernel: Linux Kernel Card Services 3.1.22
Apr 12 08:59:34 Q-redhat kernel: options: [pci] [cardbus] [pm]
Apr 12 08:59:34 Q-redhat kernel: ds: no socket drivers loaded!
Apr 12 08:59:34 Q-redhat kernel: unloading Kernel Card Services

It almost seems as though either the pcmcia_core & yenta_socket drivers aren't loading or the ds driver is set to load before these two and thus can't find what it needs and shuts the cardmgr down.

I don't know now, man You might try getting the latest pcmcia drivers and recompiling them for your machine. Maybe someone else knows what's going on?

Well I had been tentative to install a non redhat pcmcia version but decided that I was up against a wall. Downloaded 3.2.4, compiled & installed it and everything came right up as expected...

Thanks for the help...

Did you use the rpm?

nope, I had tried the rpm from redhat without success...this time I downloaded the source & compiled...

Hi guys,

I had the same problem as you when I upgraded from RH7.3 to RH9...

I found that it was an error in the /etc/init.d/pcmcia script

If you search for "modprobe" you'll find that the script is trying to modprobem the modules with the trailing ".o", i.e. "ds.o"...


Just remove the ".o" and do a /etc/init.d/pcmcia start and it will rock! ;o)


//jonas