I have been trying for several days to install the SMC 2632W-V2 wireless network card onto my Toshiba Satellite 1805-S274 notebook running RH8.0. I puchased theis card because I saw that is was supposed to work with Linux but am having no luck at all with it.

I downloaded the GPL drivers that were supposed to work with this card and followed the info I found at: https://iprserv.jura.uni-leipzig.de/...er/000475.html

I did not do the patches since the current driver appears to be newer than the one described in the how-to.

After compiling and installing the drivers all I get in /var/log/messages when I insert the card is:
Mar 16 12:43:15 toshiba cardmgr[572]: unsupported card in socket 1
Mar 16 12:43:15 toshiba cardmgr[572]: product info: "SMC", "2632W-V2"
Mar 16 12:43:15 toshiba cardmgr[572]: manfid: 0x01bf, 0xb301 function: 6 (network)

I have editied the /etc/pcmcia/options file to add the card as described, and I can modprobe the pcmf502r module without any error messages, but the card is not being recognized.

I am dual booting WinXP and RH8 and the card works great under WIndows. I am fairly new to Linux and am trying to do more work with Linux, but this is very frustrating to me.

I am probably missing something here that is preventing me from getting this done. Any help, advise, or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks....

Bob

You can't hand modprobe a pcmcia module, the cardmgr daemon has to bind it to the device... makes things a little hairy, the one biggie that you need to do is add this to /etc/pcmcia/atmel.conf:

device "pcmf502r"
class "network" module "pcmf502r"

card "SMC 2632W V2 11 Mbps Wireless PCMCIA Card"
manfid 0x01bf, 0xb301
bind "pcmf502r"

That should at least get it to try to bind the module, now if that module works... who knows if the patch hasn't been applied.

Cheers,

Finegan

I decided to give up on RH8 and put Slackware 8.1 and Dropline Gnome back on the notebook (I much prefer this setup).

After reinstalling everything I downloaded the atmelwlandrivers and compiled the pcmf502r driver for the SMC card. I created a smc.conf file with the information mentioned in the previous post and saved it to /etc/pcmcia. Now when the machine boots a get a message with an error when Slack reads the first line of the smc.conf.

When I looked in the directory for the pcmcia modules I noticed that the pcmf502f module had a .o extension while all the other slack built modules ended in .gz (a compressed version I assume). Do I need to convert the pcmf502r.o module to a .gz format for use in Slackware? If so can anyone tell me how I should do this?

I am enjoying the learning process but this is a lot harder than it should be IMO.

Thanks for any help or advice....

Bob

No, the pre-compression of modules is just convention, there's something wrong with the syntax in the .conf you created, can you post the exact contents of the file with the ]code[ and ]/code[ tags around it so the justification is kept. (reverse the brackets so the tag works)

Cheers,

Finegan