After months of getting no reply at the Puppy Forum, I'm going to try this question here.

I've got a silicon fossil laptop with a 10/100 ethernet card in a PCMCIA slot. Puppy 5.0.1 (I know 5.1.1 is out) does not see my PCMCIA so it reports no ethernet adapter.

If I boot from a KNOPPIX 5.1 live CD, I can get on the web web right away via PPPOE. KNOPPIX sees the PCMCIA and the ethernet card; Puppy doesn't. Using Puppy, the LED on the ethernet card doesn't light up and the ADSL modem "ethernet" (LAN) LED stays dark.

Same problem with a Puppy 5.0.1 live CD and a Puppy 5.0.1 full install on my HD. I don't know much about Linux, but I think there's some command called "modprobe" that I don't know how to use that might be configured to find my PCMCIA.

Anyone want to be unlike the folks at the Puppy forum and take a crack at answering this?

In order to have a any pcmcia card seen by the system, you need the pcmcia diver loaded. To see if it is on your system, open a konsole, and navigate to a directory that will look something like this:

The exact path on your system will be a little different. The third dir in, '2.6.33.7-desktop-1mnb' is for my currently running kernel. Just go in one dir at a time, do an ls, you should be able to find your way. The pcmica modules are in the last 'pcmcia' dir.

The command 'modinfo modulename' will give you some idea of the module you need to load so you can 'see' any card. Once loaded, and a card plugged, then you can load the driver for the card.

Modules are loaded with 'modprobe nameofthemodule'. No news is good news. If you get no output, the module loaded. You can display loaded modules with 'lsmod'.

If you load up Knoppix, do a lsmod, you probably can figure out what the modules are you will need to load. Use lsmod, and with knowing what is in the pcmcia dir, you should be able to figure it out.

If you can not, post what you have in the pcmcia dir, the results of lsmod, and as much as you know about the card you are trying to get working.

Let us know, how you are doing...

I had issues with 5.0 also but not with 5.1.1 Note: 5.2 is almost ready.

Try issuing the command pcmcia-socket-startup in a terminal window

If this cures your problem then edit /etc/init.d/rc.pcmcia and remove the comment from the same command.

Cheers
Peter

p.s. I'm sure this would have been answered on the main forum - where did you post it? I'm only here because the main forum is off-air today.

I don't have the stomach to mess around with Linux command line stuff and I don't have the money to buy Apple's supported implementation of Unix. Since I'm posting about a laptop that'll be 12 years old this year, it's not a priority problem for me; I'd just rather have a laptop than a doorstop.

I waited for Puppy 5.2, wiped the Puppy 5.1.1 partition and installed Puppy 5.2 in its place. For whatever reason, Puppy 5.2 sees my ethernet card in the PCMCIA slot whereas Puppy 5.1.1 didn't. So now I'm back on the internet with the same hardware and a newer version of Puppy.

So it goes.

the main forum is at best a lost cause or worse a sinking ship