Ian's right on about the controller thingy. There's two components to getting any PCMCIA device working:
1) The controller (I may have called it "chipset" for lack of a proper term) 2) The card (be it a PCMCIA NIC, PCMCIA CF adapter, etc.) The controller is like the PCMCIA "bay", if you will, as viewed in its empty state. It is attached to the motherboard via a bus, like everything else, and the kernel has to know which chipset that controller uses in order to load a driver to fire the thing up. Until that happens (successfully), it won't matter what card is plugged into the bay. Then when you plug a card into the bay, it recognizes that there is a device attached to your device which is attached to your motherboard (since that is what PCMCIA is for) and tries to find drivers for that peripheral. Usually autodetection of PCMCIA controllers is flawless, but sometimes some tweaked out BIOS settings get the Linux kernel all confusedy. :-) On the CardBus issue... CardBus is just a nice proprietary name for the PCMCIA bay. It looks like the difference is largely between 16-bit and 32-bit. Probably any card that you use will be fine, unless you have some really old 16-bit PCMCIA cards kicking around. Here's a link to a whatis.com definition of CardBus: http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci213783,00.html. And here's a link to some good information, believe it or not, from Microsoft on CardBus technologies: http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/bus/cardbus/cardbus1P.asp. While I'm at it (for archival purposes)... The BIOS setting that most held up Linux from running on any of the IBM laptops (until the last year or so) I have used was PCI bus power management settings. That is, power management settings for the PCI bus. (Interesting, now that I think of it, since PCMCIA is a kind of PCI-to-PCI bus as well.) The setting was, of course, set to Auto. Disabling it made the problem go away. Here's a link to some (old) info about SuSE 6.4 on a ThinkPad: http://www.linuxcare.com/labs/certs/pada20m-suse64-config.epl. But the article also has some good info about some old PCMCIA issues, as well. (BTW, the PCI bus PM settings needed to be disabled in order to get audio working.) Anyways, I'm rambling, but I hope some of this can be of some use, and most of all, I'm glad you got an easy solution, Jarrod. You can tell your wife "Enjoy Linux!", from me. :-D Curtis. -----Original Message----- From: Ian Bruseker [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, February 11, 2003 7:06 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: (clug-talk) (help) Laptop Issue -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Jarrod, That it was hanging at that point had nothing to do with the card, but rather the controller. A pc card is to the slot what a hard drive is to the IDE controller. It was hanging because it wasn't able to talk to the controller properly. Don't know about the memory card. Sorry. The only thing I use pcmcia for on this laptop is a 3Com 3c589C network card, which works just fine with the bios set to cardbus. Ian On Tuesday 11 February 2003 05:57 pm, Jarrod Major wrote: > Hey guys, > > Okay went into BIOS, there was in fact a setting for specifying the PCMCIA > connection type. I took of off auto and set it to CardBus. I saved and > rebooted and it did in fact get past the PCMCIA kernel module this time. > Kari's system is now sitting happily at SuSE tour screen. Thanks again guys > for your help. That was realtively painless. I'll have to file that one > away. > > I can only assume now that it will not accept a true PCMCIA card, or will > it. The reason I ask is that she sometimes has a PCMCIA memory card adapter > for SmartMedia or something from work that she plugs in. It won't be the > end of the world if she can't use that card anymore. > > Also, I'm not sure why it hung at this kernel module even with the card out > of the laptop? -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE+SawPSiY+RXI7JS4RAoyTAKCoSq+TTHtXUT1NEOFZf1wk+E+bvgCgiTIs OFSlcR+nTxmLy/ozM4+j1ro= =zuAO -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
