> i'm almost ready to go out and buy an intel ether express card,
thanks, jim, for saving me $100. thank goodness the np10t card was
only $35.
> tonight i'll try to get my other notebook (with the 3com etherlink
III
> card -- i think it's a 3c585d) talking to the net.
it's really a 3c589d, but what's a few digits among friends? by the
way, the etherlink III is what stanford tells its students to buy for
networking on the campus. or at least that's what the salesman
claimed. at any rate, it's supposed to be very reliable.
i couldn't get the 6.1 upgraded kernel (2.2.13-22mdk) to network with
the etherlink III. i traced system startup from /etc/inittab to the
rc files. i even saw the note that the kernel no longer looks at
/lib/modules/preferred/, sigh. but nothing that i tried made the link
light come on.
finally i tarred /lib/modules/2.2.13-22mdk/* (or whatever it's called)
to the nearly-empty /lib/modules/2.2.13-7mdk/ directory and rebooted.
the bootup process hung in the "resolving module library dependencies"
section. booting in single-user mode didn't work either --
dependencies need to get resolved on even a single-user system.
i figured that i'd just re-install 6.1 and skip the kernel upgrade
like i did last time. however, the bootnet.img + pcmcia.img files get
the errors that i (thought i) reported earlier as a bug. i've
forgotten the error messages and i even forgot how i worked around it
before, alas.
at 2am i remembered that i had gotten a 6.1 installation going far
enough to format the disk, which got me far enough to reboot and
install the system. so i used the debian distro's cfdisk to wipe the
disk clean and define /boot, root, and swap partitions. i still
couldn't reinstall mandrake 6.1.
so now i have two dead notebooks and no pcmcia installation method.
bummer. even worse, my working notebooks both run windows. what an
insult. maybe i should try to reinstall freebsd-pao on one of the
dead machines -- at least that's open source.
-- bd
