[ltp] Problems with PCMCIA

[Tod Harter]

That card is not supported, BUT that does not mean it can't be supported. The 
first question is if there is a linux driver for the card at all. If there 
is, then you can add the card to the list of known cards for cardctl (its 
just a text file) and put the proper stuff in your modules.conf file, etc. 
Really all the cardctl thing does is get a hotplug message from the kernel 
and then go out, find the ident string for the card, look it up in its little 
database, and load the corresponding driver with modprobe. 

That being said, cardctl ident should ALWAYS identify even unknown cards. Try 
it in both slots. You should be able to get a manufacturer ID string, which 
is what it uses to find the proper driver.

One other thing, CardBus and PCMCIA are not 100% the same thing... CardBus 
support may be enabled in your kernel, in which case you have to do things 
different (though I honestly haven't ever messed with the in-kernel CardBus 
stuff myself). I guess the plan is that all CardBus/PCMCIA support is being 
migrated into the kernel. Mostly this is to solve problems with the order of 
device initialization on boot. Right now there are some major ugly hacks in 
place to handle initializing network cards after PCMCIA support starts etc. 



On Tuesday 09 April 2002 01:24, Jason MacDermott wrote:
> > AFAIK, older ThinkPads need a kernel parameter floppy=thinkpad. However,
> > I really don't know if this applies to a 365.
>
> Thanks for the tip - the floppy drive works fine with Debian 2.2 now, and
> can be mounted with vfat-format disks.  Great!
>
> Now that I can get some more Debian packages onto this system, I have run
> into another problem:  I'd like to get my CardBus (Ambicom 2100) PCMCIA
> Network card running.  I used "cardctl" to see if it detected the two
> PCMCIA ports, and it detected 2 Sockets (0 and 1).
>
> However, it tells me they are empty, even if I've restarted the system with
> the card in and hooked up.
>
> Does this mean that its not detecting my card at all, or that it just
> doesn't know what kind of card it is?  I've never used PCMCIA cards before,
> but I would have thought that "cardctl ident" would report the card
> detected, just unknown?
>
> Thanks for any help!
> Jay
>
>
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