How to use 3Com PCMCIA LAN+modem card on Wary5.5?

[frantal]

I have installed Wary 5.5 on an old notebook Acer TM212TX (P3 800Mhz, Ram 512 Mhz). Before I tried Debian Wheezy XFCE by upgrading from Squeeze. Debian is a little slow in operating and so I installed Puppy Wary hoping to get faster. It likes fast operating, but I have a problem that the OS doesn't recognize the PCMCIA 3Com card (10/100 LAN +modem 56K) and my tryment to install drivers suggested and also trying to install with ndiswrapper windows drivers, didn't solve the problem. On Debian (Squeeze and Wheezy both) they read the lAN card without problems. What could I do to let read and install this card? Many thanks and regards

[tempestuous]

Some diagnosis is necessary. Run these 2 commands -

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pccardctl status

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pccardctl ident

Hopefully you will see your Cardbus listed. Please tell us the device ID you see reported.

[tempestuous]

???

[frantal]

I gave the commands as suggested:

# pccardctl status
Socket 0:
5.0V 16-bit PC Card
Subdevice 0 (function 0) [unbound]
#pccardctl ident
Socket 0:
product info: "3Com", "Megahertz 3CCFEN556BI". "A", "001"
manfid: 0x0101, 0x0556
function: 6 (network)
#
How can I continue now?
Many thanks....

[tempestuous]

OK, your device ID is 0101:0556 and this is supported by the 3c574_cs driver.
I just checked Wary 5.5 now - it definitely contains the 3c574_cs driver.

First you should to check whether Wary has automatically loaded this driver. So run this command -

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lsmod

and see if "3c574_cs" is listed.
If yes, check whether the driver has created a valid network interface, by running this command -

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ifconfig -a

If you can see "eth0" listed, then all you should need to do is run the Network Wizard. Use the full Network Wizard, not the Simple Network Wizard.


If "lsmod" shows that the 3c574_cs driver is not loaded, you can configure the Network Wizard to load it - via the "Load module" button.

[frantal]

Hello,
I tried lsmod and 3c574_cs is present.

ifconfig -a.
Lo. Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436. Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0. dropped:0 overruns:0. frame:0
TX packets:0. errors:0. dropped:0. overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0. txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:0 (0.0 B). TX. bytes:0 (0.0 B)
So no eth0 is present.
Other advices?
Thanks for the help

[tempestuous]

So the 3c574_cs driver has auto-loaded, as it should, but not properly - it has failed to create a valid network interface.
Sometimes all that's required to fix such a situation is to unload/reload the driver, as such -

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rmmod 3c574_cs

then

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modprobe 3c574_cs

Now check for an interface -

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ifconfig -a

Hopefully you will see "eth0" listed.

If not, we need to dig deeper - I need to see the output of the "dmesg" command. The results of this command can be very lengthy, so here's what to do - run these 3 commands -

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cd /root
dmesg > dmesg.txt
gzip dmesg.txt

Now in /root you will have a file called "dmesg.txt.gz" which you can attach to the forum.

[frantal]

Attached the file requested from you.
Thanks again!

[frantal]

Just because I saw in the dmesg.txt, I have to add that I connected an USB/Ethernet converter and it worked, but just to try another possibility. I can't use this converter as fixed, so I need to solve the incompatibility with the PCMCIA card. Thanks again

[tempestuous]

pcmcia 0.0: firmware: requesting cis/3CCFEM556.cis
firmware 0.0: firmware_loading_store: vmap() failed

There's the problem - the driver has failed to load, or locate, the associated firmware (3CCFEM556.cis). That's strange, because Wary 5.5 definitely contains this firmware.

I now attach the firmware as a dotpet ... but before you install it, I suggest you first use ROX to look in /lib/firmware/cis/
to see if "3CCFEM556.cis" is present.
Also check that its filesize is listed as 137 B.

If all looks good, then installing this dotpet is unlikely to change anything.

But if the firmware file is missing, or if its filesize is different, then installing this dotpet will likely fix your problem.

[frantal]

Unfortunately, the file is present in /lib/firmware/cis and its filesize is 137 B. The strange is that with Debian (Wheezy and Squeeze) it works without problems. Waiting for the next help...
Thanks

[frantal]

Here attached, lsmod.txt with module 3c574 loaded. Here the size is different.

[tempestuous]

It seems to me that Wary's 3c574_cs driver is failing. I don't know how to fix this, apart from shifting to a different Puppy version ...
which is not a bad thing, because I consider Puppy Lucid to be a better all-round option than Wary. The latest update of the Puppy Lucid series is 5.2.8.6 -
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=90461

Just be aware that Lucid had a known problem with failing to detect certain PCMCIA interfaces. This problem can be overcome, but make sure to do the same diagnosis as before, with these commands -

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pccardctl status

and

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pccardctl ident

[frantal]

I chose Wary bcs more adaptable for this old notebook; infact there is also Wheezy on it but it goes very slow even if I used XFCE. I will see what to do!
Many thanks for the help and regards.

[tempestuous]

I chose Wary bcs more adaptable for this old notebook

You will find that Lucid is just as "adaptable" for your notebook.

Your notebook is Pentium3 (i686 compatible) with plenty of RAM, so I don't think you need to be looking at older or "low-resource" Puppy versions at all. Slacko would probably work fine, too.

[frantal]

Thanks for the advices and for the help. I will see before if I can get a faster Debian and if I will try one other Puppy version I will post the results or ask other help if needed.... Greetings