No PCMCIA networking with "nopcmcia" boot option?

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Chris Thorne
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Joined: Thu 17 May 2007, 03:05

No PCMCIA networking with "nopcmcia" boot option?

#1 Post by Chris Thorne »

I have an old Thinkpad 560X here and, on a lark, decided to try a Puppy install. This system has no internal CD drive (clumsy external SCSI is possible) and can not be booted from USB. It will boot from a PCMCIA flash drive, though.

I syslinuxed a flash drive, performed a frugal install of Puppy 2.15CE, and found that the boot would freeze on "Loading kernel modules" unless the "nopcmcia" flag was set. Once that was done, Puppy loaded nicely. Very impressive! Extremely impressive. The 560X used to run RedHat 2.4.7, but was groaning and unusable with that. And configuring RH was grueling. It took me a week to get to the point with RH that took a few hours with Puppy.

OK, so Puppy is up and running. Would Puppy config my wi-fi with an old Orinoco Gold card as easily? I fired up the networking wizard. Regrettably, no. Autoprobe failed. Manual selection of the Orinoco module failed.

Ah! Wait a minute. I had forgotten that I had booted with "nopcmcia" set. The kernel won't be able to see the Orinoco card.

Invoking cardctl, dmesg, and lsmod make it clear that there is no PCMCIA support of any kind currently active.

Since I seem to need that -nopcmcia flag to get up and running, what would be the suggested procedure to manually instantiate PCMCIA and Cardbus support once Puppy has loaded?

sphetr2
Posts: 18
Joined: Fri 25 May 2007, 15:34

PCMCIA networking with "nopcmcia" boot option

#2 Post by sphetr2 »

I'm having the same problem. How can I do this?

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rcrsn51
Posts: 13096
Joined: Tue 05 Sep 2006, 13:50
Location: Stratford, Ontario

#3 Post by rcrsn51 »

I wonder what happens if you do a frugal install to the hard drive and boot from there instead of from the PCMCIA port. Will the "nopcmcia" option still be necessary?

sphetr2
Posts: 18
Joined: Fri 25 May 2007, 15:34

#4 Post by sphetr2 »

Puppy is installed to hard drive already. If I boot without "nopcmcia", the computer turns off at "loading kernel modules...".

sphetr2
Posts: 18
Joined: Fri 25 May 2007, 15:34

#5 Post by sphetr2 »

Bump. Please help! Isn't it just a simple modprobe or something?

tempestuous
Posts: 5464
Joined: Fri 10 Jun 2005, 05:12
Location: Australia

#6 Post by tempestuous »

First, many such problems are not specific to Puppy Linux, and are best dealt with by a general web search.
It appears that the Cardbus interface in the Thinkpad 560X is a Texas Instruments 1250, supported (but problematic) with the yenta_socket module.

Code: Select all

modprobe yenta_socket
rm /var/run/cardmgr.pid
cardmgr
Now you can load the module for your Orinoco Gold

Code: Select all

modprobe orinoco

sphetr2
Posts: 18
Joined: Fri 25 May 2007, 15:34

#7 Post by sphetr2 »

Sorry if I came off a little rude there.

Anyway, when I said I'm in the same situation, I didn't mean the exact same. I should've been more clear...

I have a Netgear WG511 v3 wi fi card that works with ndiswrapper. The problem is, when I boot with nopcmcia, it won't work.

jonyo

#8 Post by jonyo »

I think I'm having this prob with a compaq presario 1220 lap. Looked here http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/prod ... 83&lang=en but haven't found detailed info yet on the carbus interface (I'll search some more but in the meantime..). Any info? All I know at this point is when I boot with pup98 or more recent live CDs is that the pcmcia wifi (netgear ma401ra) card doesn't light up which I think means the pcmcia slot is not being recognized. When I boot this same setup in a similar ibm lap, the light on the pcmcia wifi card starts flashing on boot & works.

Maybe another boot option might work with the 1220 to make the pcmcia slot work?
tempestuous wrote:First, many such problems are not specific to Puppy Linux, and are best dealt with by a general web search.
It appears that the Cardbus interface in the Thinkpad 560X is a Texas Instruments 1250, supported (but problematic) with the yenta_socket module.

Code: Select all

modprobe yenta_socket
rm /var/run/cardmgr.pid
cardmgr
Now you can load the module for your Orinoco Gold

Code: Select all

modprobe orinoco

sphetr2
Posts: 18
Joined: Fri 25 May 2007, 15:34

#9 Post by sphetr2 »

bumpety bump bump

tempestuous
Posts: 5464
Joined: Fri 10 Jun 2005, 05:12
Location: Australia

#10 Post by tempestuous »

sphetr2, it's difficult to help you
i) you haven't told us what version of Puppy you are running.
ii) you haven't told us the details of your laptop.
iii) you haven't mentioned whether you tried the commands I suggested above to manually set up the cardbus interface.

sphetr2
Posts: 18
Joined: Fri 25 May 2007, 15:34

#11 Post by sphetr2 »

tempestuous wrote: i) you haven't told us what version of Puppy you are running.
Puppy 2.14
tempestuous wrote: ii) you haven't told us the details of your laptop.
Dell Latitude CPi - 400 mhz pentium 2, ~256 MB RAM, 10 GB HDD, Netgear WG511 v3 wireless card.
tempestuous wrote: iii) you haven't mentioned whether you tried the commands I suggested above to manually set up the cardbus interface.
Those are for the Thinkpad and Orinoco, which I do not have. If you really need e to run them, I will, but they probably won't work, amirite?

tempestuous
Posts: 5464
Joined: Fri 10 Jun 2005, 05:12
Location: Australia

#12 Post by tempestuous »

sphetr2 wrote:but they probably won't work, amirite?
No, except for the orinoco module, of course.
Most modern cardbus interfaces are supported by the same "yenta_socket" module.
So the first 3 commands I mentioned should get your cardbus interface working.
To check

Code: Select all

cardctl status
cardctl ident
Regarding the WG511 v3, this contains the problematic Prism54-softmac chipset.
The only Linux driver for this chipset is the beta "prism54-islsm" driver available here -
http://dotpups.de/dotpups/Wifi/drivers- ... 2-to-2.14/
After installing the dotpet, load the islsm modules

Code: Select all

modprobe islsm
modprobe islsm_device
modprobe islsm_pci
If these modules load without error messages, a network interface (eth0 or eth1) should have been created. Run "ifconfig -a" and "iwconfig" to check. If the network interface is listed, you can now configure with the Network Wizard.

sphetr2
Posts: 18
Joined: Fri 25 May 2007, 15:34

#13 Post by sphetr2 »

Thanks! yenta_socket did the trick. I just added modprobe yenta_socket to rc.local.

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