Mandriva 2005 LE Mini, Xircom PCMCIA eth0
 

Hi folks,

having been a Mandrake user for about a year back in 1999 or so, I stumbled upon Mandriva 2005 LE Mini as a minimal-base candidate for my latest laptop server. I ended up installing practically everything from the CD, as the collection of software suited my taste perfectly. Mandriva looks wonderful and I'm really eager to start recommending this snappy installer to my friends, except that ...

after installation, the system just cannot get my Xircom Realport 10/100 (model RE-100) PCMCIA network adapter up !!

It works just fine *during* installation, as I can verify from the virtual terminal; I can ping my gateway/world, the NIC leds light up and all, there's a string in dmesg... just beautiful really :) The card also works fine on the same laptop (which is a Thinkpad 600E btw) running Knoppix 3.8, so I trust the hardware.

I can manually modprobe pcmcia*, yenta_socket and xirc2ps_cs but I never get the 'eth0 ready' (or equivalent) into dmesg that way. I've tried bypassing the 10/100 auto-negotiation with if_port=xx. service network status & /etc/sysconfig/network* all assure me that the device is configured OK (just not active).

I've run a fresh install three times now, counting the first that I did before the NIC arrived. There are no error messages anywhere. The only suspicious thing that I've found so far is that there's no pcmcia-related stuff in mod*.conf, and neither anything to do with pcmcia under /etc/init.d/. However, on the live-cd's /etc I can see juicy looking pcmcia/network scripts that I'll probably try to snatch tomorrow -- unless I find help here first ;-)

So my QUESTION really is, has anyone had similar experiences, possibly problems with pcmcia initialization? Could anyone find out for me if drakx or whatever's controlling the installation is initializing the (Xircom) network adapter with some special parameters?

Thanks in advance!

--
jute

chances are it's a PC-Bus card rather than a PCMCIA card, they look the same, and use the same slot, but one (card bus ) is 32 bit where the other is 16 bit

search google.com/linux for the card

This is a 16bit card, and the thinkpad should handle cardbus ok anyways.

The hardware works, and it even works in Mandriva Mini -- during installation.


--
:) jussi

Dude,

Not sure if this is the case but see if you can do a manual
ifup eth0
If that works, put it in an init script.

I've had trrouble with all my attepts to run Mandrake on laptops.
It appears that the startup can't get it up... ;)

Oops sorry I've forgot to do a post:

This problem was eventually solved when I realised that the Mini CD isn't supposed to be
a stand-alone 'mini' distro, but just a minimal installer for the full Mandriva. I was using *just*
the data on the CD when I first posted about the problem. When I included a network mirror in the
installation (and selected quite a few extra packages too, I admit ;-)) the problem went away.

Of course there's still some weirdness in the direction of Mini CD / PCMCIA / Xircom initializations,
but I stopped caring once I got my system running.

I have to say it again: Mandriva is still a very impressive distro. Simple and user-friendly for a
beginner, yet full-featured for I should think any advanced user's needs. And the installer
is one of the better ones too.