Mandrake ate it again (not surprising) with DELL TrueMobile 1150 wirless card. >:[
 

Ok, after a bad start with the Gigafast thumb drive, I decided to get something I know would work. So I got a DELL TrueMobile 1150 Series card. And when I pluged it in Mandrake 10.1, it worked, it found the module, and all is good. Then I accidently press "Fn + Sleep, or that moon crescent" and it went it sleep mode, I turned it back on to see my desktop, but ever since, I could never get the PCMCIA card to work again, ever. I restarted, I tried Confgure My Computer program that Mandrake 10.1 had. But to no prevail. I just now reinstalled it, and the surprising thing is that it FOUND THE F***ER when it was installing the OS. Then after I rebooted, it lost it. That stupid piece of shit mandrake again is not doing what it said it was supposed to do. I got MDK 10.1 because the company said it had better support for wireless connections on laptops. I'm totaly starting to doubt this. Can someone AT LEAST tell me what the driver module is? I tried orinico_cs, but it didn't work, and prism2_cs isn't there. Thanx in advance.

Wow, now I tried a RJ-45 network card for a laptop, and I tried to find teh driver, and it seems gay mandrake can't find any PCMCIA cards.

If you re-installed Mandrake over itself this may propegate the problem.

Sleep mode disables the PCMCIA services as with it on, the computer usually cannot power down.

When the machine is restarted the script and configuration files (as well as sometimes BIOS level assignments) get changed to reflect the LACK of PCMCIA support and/or sometimes device precedance gets changed.

I've seen exactly what you are talking about with exactly the same Dell card on my HP 5155 laptop (which I retrofitted with that card...)

It drove me nuts until I found that after the one sleep attempt mandrake would indeed recognize the card but that it had permanently reasigned it to be eth2 instead of eth1 which it was previously.

This may be more of a kernel issue than a Mandrake one though.

So what do I do? I went back from sleep mode, reinstalled a second time, and while I was reinstalling, the status light turned on on my PCMCIA card, then it stoped after I restarted my computer. Im out of ideas.

What does /etc/lilo.conf look like?

Often the ACPI settings are crucial to the operation of the PCMCIA devices.

Do PCMCIA services start?

What happens when you type (as root) "service pcmcia restart".

When I type "service pcmcia restart" I get this...

Shutting down PCMCIA Services: ERROR: Module ds is in use by orinoco)cs ERROR: Module pcmcia_core is in use by orinoco_cs,ds
done.
Starting PCMCIA services: cardmgr[5232]: no sockets found!
done.

Then when I do /sbin/cardmgr, I get this...

# cardmgr[5232]: no sockets found!

How do I get it to recognize the sockets?

Ok, I've been here, but I'm a bit foggy on this so please bear with...

All of this is familiar to me but it's been over a year since I played with this particular configuration.

What seems to happen is that because of a bug in the way the BIOS initializes the PCMCIA card, Linux doesn't always see it upon a reboot.

On my Ze5155 with that particular card, if I go from Winblows to Linux without powering off my machine, I'll loose WiFi when linux comes up.

Mandrake will also try to remove the card from the hardware inventory, and cardmgr services reports not sockets found.

I remember getting into the habit of ALWAYS fully powering down the machine before going into Linux, which subsequently would cause cardmanager services to correctly start.

And yeah sleep mode basically powers down the card without off the computer, causing the behaviour you are describing.

It's a problem with the cardmanger not being able to reinit the cardbus and all associated devices upon restart.

Windows has to perform a complete re-init (which is why the card disappears for a few seconds) after a wake up, if it finds an entry in the registry.

Linux's hibernation and sleep modes do not operate the same way.

I was never really able to get around this so even now I never bother with sleep mode on that system, if WiFi is enabled.

I know I have to cold boot the machine to get my WiFi back.

BTW: This problem belongs in the kernel bugtrackers.

Sooo? How do I fix my problem? I did a cold shutdown. Several times, I even let the power go out. But this is realy gay, I bought a laptop with a wireless card I cant even F'n use anymore. Could you tell me exactly how you got it back to functioning? BTW: I have a Panasonic Toughbook CF-47 with the wireless card described above, does this mean my only option is to buy another f'n notebook?

For cardservices to work somewhat properly ACPI must be enabled in Lilo.conf

e.g. the acpi=ht must be removed and there should be nothing which reads noacpi.

Next remember what I mentioned about Linux not finding the PCMCIA devices when it is warm booted, with these cards in place.

You could delete any references to the orinoco_cs, etc. in /etc/modules.conf then perform a full shutdown.

Then bring up Linux again but bring it up in text mode. As it comes up it should recognize the card again.

Configure it in TEXT mode, not via the gui using harddrake.

See if you can get it working.

If so make a copy of the files in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts, particularly the ones which represent you wlan interface.

On my HP the WLAN interface appears as eth2, go figure...

Then start the gui, or shutdown and cold boot.

Upon the next boot set Linux to NOT utilize sleep or hibernation modes.

Since there after you'll be cold booting the machine whenever you want WiFi the card should be redetected and at worst case you can copy back the configuration files you saved.

Yeah this is a REAL kludge and I wish I had a better solution.

On my Ze5155 I am running 10.0.

This was highly problematic with the stock kernels. I eventually upgraded to one of the 2.6.9 kernels which improved this dramatically.

Now it still does not resume from sleep (forget about this with the Truemobile for the moment), but it does bring up cardservices and the WiFi link far more reliably now.

However every once in a while I'll dual boot into Windows and then boot back to Linux only to find that WiFi doesn't come up again.

When I'm propted to "remove" the device I just skip past this, which preserves the old configuration files, upon a subsequent cold boot everything is normal again.

Didn't work. There wasn't anything in /etc/modules.conf. Im about to drop kick this piece of shit. I can't believe almost no one else has this problem on the net. (I did multiple googles, but no one seems to hit the moon key) Plz, someone reply to this thread if they had this problem!

NOTE: I thought mandrake 10.1 had "Better" support for WIFI and Wireless for laptops?

PS: So far thanx for the help, and sry for being so angry, but when you buy a laptop and a wireless card, you kinda want to use it. :/

Ok, you forced me to boot up my Laptop with the WiFi card in it.

It's currently running Mandrake 10, using 2.6.3-19mdk (not .9)

ATI_kernel-2.6.3.7mdk-3.7.6-2mdk

my /etc/modules.conf includes

alias eth0 ip1394
alias eth1 natsemi
alias eth2 orinoco

my /etc/modprobe.conf also includes the above lines


Mandrake kept re-assigning the Truemobile card (orinoco) to eth2 all the time so I finally gave in to this. It made a bid difference doing so... that is not fighting the change.

ifcfg-eth2 reads

DEVICE=eth2
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
NETWORK=192.168.0.0
BROADCAST=192.168.0.255
ONBOOT=no
HWADDR=00:02:2d;7c:49:5d
WIRELESS_MODE=Managed
WIRELESS_ESSID=MYESSID
WIRELESS_ENC_KEY="XXXXXXXXXX"
DHCP_HOSTNAME=MyMachine
NEEDHOSTNAME=no

I made a change to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/network-functions

Under 10.0 when I traced this script I found that it was looking for configuration files in /etc/sysconfig/networking/default/ instead of /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/

So I changed two lines to reflect this...

/etc/sysconfig/pcmcia

reads

PCIC=yenta_socket
PCMCIA=yes

Manually starting and stopping PCMCIA results in

cardmgr [3556]: watching 3 sockets

I also had to switch to a "more compatible" version of XFree than that originally released with 10.0

My problems did not diminish until I upgraded to XFree86-4.3-32.2.100mdk which affected my machine's ability to find the PCMCIA sockets.

(I vaguely remember that video problems and freezing were directly related...)

when card services are loaded via (service PCMCIA start) I get an entry in dmesg called

pavilion cardmgr [1143]: executing: 'modprobe orinoco_cs'

I have to manually bring up the link with

ifup eth0

to get WiFi working, but it does work.

Dunno what else to tell you.

I have this system up and running before me as I type, yet I distinctly recall having exactly the same problems both with the Truemobile card & PCMCIA services, and also the relationship (in my case) to the ATI and XFRee drivers on this system.

Once I solved the video issue the PCMCIA issue cleared up quite a bit.

Omg! :D You saved me a laptop and a Wireless Card! Its ppl like you that keep me on linux! Thanx opjose!

PS: Do you have Affero? :]

Are you telling me the above worked?????!!!!

What's Affero?

Yes it did work! Are you trying to say you bs'ed it? lol :P I'm not quite sure what affero is, since I never used it, because no one helped me on such a stressfull problem, but it's a program that someone gets an account and when they help someone out, and that person believes you REALY helped them out one way or another, then they can give you a good rating, or donate something to you. I dont know too much, but go here, www.affero.com, get and account, and I may give you something. (believe me, this was a bigger problem then I made it out to be, its worth something)