On Thu, 2002-08-08 at 16:06, Mike Manchester wrote:
> After the presentation at the Tampa last month on Debian I decided to
> install it on my thinkpad that I can't get X windows under Redhat to
> work on. Any how. After burning all 6 Debian cd's I embarked upon
> install it. The install went kinda ok, it asked me questions I hadn't
> been asked since Redhat 5.x days. But after everything was installed it
> came up an told me I didn't need PCMCIA support WHAT I SAID. This is a
> thinkpad with PCMCIA slots one of which is my Ethernet card. So I
> responded NO to the question could it be removed. But after the reboot.
> My Ethernet card didn't work. So does anyone have any ideas why this
> would happen and how do I get the Ethernet card to work?
Having just fought last night for 4 hours trying to get Potato installed
on an old Quantum laptop using the PCMCIA drivers in the 2.2 kernel, I
can attest to the pain that you are going through.
At the beginning, one of the options to select (before configure
network) is "configure pcmcia" where you can select an i82365 or TCIC
chipset driver. Unfortunately, mine was neither (as a cardbus chipset
only supported by Linus' hacked up "yenta_socket" driver, I was in for
some pain). So, I enabled i82365, switched to VT2 (Alt-f2) and did a
"modprobe yenta_socket" and manually edited the
/mnt/target/etc/pcmcia.conf file to used yenta_socket instead.
Unfortunately, this didn't fix my problem either, as the base install of
debian doesn't appear to have a driver for 3c575 cards (only 3c574), the
orinoco_cs driver is ancient and wouldn't talk to my cards newer
firmware revisions, and the airo driver wouldn't work at all.
The solution? I ended up using an old Xircom (xircps) 16bit PCMCIA
10Mbit card to bootstrap the poor thing to the point where I could:
1. Manually update to woody
2. Install a 2.4.18-686 kernel
- realize that even the new kernel won't work right.
- curse. rant. move on.
3. Install the 2.4.18 kernel-source
- manually copy /boot/config-2.4.18-686 to
/usr/src/kernel-source-2.4.18/.config
- edit Makefile to make the version appear to be "2.4.18-686"
- make dep
4. Install pcmcia-cs-source
- dpkg-buildpackage against my "pseudo kernel source" above
- install the handbuilt package
5. Install wireless-tools
- configure pcmcia wireless.opts to auto-join the AP
After doing this, I *finally* have a laptop with working drivers that
can talk to my wireless cards for bootstrapping the rest. Did I mention
how I had to drag the entire mess into the computer room just to get the
thing BUILT? After the wireless card was working, back to the living
room it went.
The Dell was *much* easier than this.
What's the moral of this story? Debian can be downright difficult to
deal with, even for a senior Linux admin. If you stick with it though,
anything is possible - nothing is insurmountable. Never give up.
- Ian C. Blenke <icblenke@nks.net> <ian@blenke.com>
http://ian.blenke.com
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