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