Help me with my ethernet card woes

steveland?

Hi,
I'm trying to install Linux on my laptop (it's old-ish and all I'll be using it for is programming for college/work experience and PDF files and the likes so Linux is my best bet) http://developer.novell.com/yes/58491.htm

It's a Dell Latitude CPx J650GT, upgraded to 320MB RAM and 20GB HDD (originally 64MB and 10GB HDD)

I've got a Xircom PCMCIA ethernet adapter, RE-100.

I can't get the internet to work on it (not sure what the problem is, I reckin it's the ethernet card not being picked up or something)

I found this: http://linux.about.com/library/cmd/blcmdl4_xirc2ps_cs.htm but I've no idea what any of that means...

I've only been using Live CDs: an older version of Knoppix, newest version of Ubuntu and newest version of Kubuntu.

Can anyone explain what that page I pasted means?

In "laymans" (read moron) terms please

Also what'd be the best distro to use on such a spec'd system that'd be likely to pick up a wireless card for me when I get one (I have a Linksys one downstairs, I'll check the model number tomorrow)

Capt'n Midnight

try while waiting.

In Knoppix open a root shell
ifconfig and iwconfig to see if it recognises the card - if so then run netcardconfig accept the defaults remembering to tell it to use DHCP for the IP address.

Cake Fiend

It's about installing the driver for the particular card.

[edit: Cappy got in before me ]
First run ifconfig in a shell to see if you've any cards coming up at all.

Run lsmod to see what modules (drivers, basically) are currently loaded - look for anything to do with 'pcmcia' or 'xirc'.

See if you have the driver - run 'find / -name "xirc2ps_cs.*"
The source might be in your /usr/src/--kernel-version--/drivers/net dir.

Try to install it - 'insmod xirc2ps_cs.o' - you might have to specify an interrupt range with 'irq_list=i,j,... ' after it


This document might be a good read.

Syth

If you don't know how to do any of the above (like "
First run ifconfig in a shell to see if you've any cards coming up at all." ), then run those commands from the terminal as root, and paste the output here and we'll tell you what it means etc.

niallb

Hi Steveland,
I think it's more likely that the PCMCIA slot is
not detected properly than the card itself.
Do you have any other PCMCIA cards to check?
Do you get a beep when you insert and remove it?
Does the beep sound happy ;-)

I had one of the older CPia models, and I think
I had to change the name for the pcmcia driver.
If the above looks like the slots not working,
I'll see if I can track down the old configuration.

Ubuntu is a good distro for such a beast.
You've plenty memory for it.
Debian might give you a wider choice of
development tools depending on what
programming you need to do.
Good luck with it,
NiallB

syklops

I had almost the exact model of laptop with a xircom and it worked fine. I used a harddrive install of Knoppix, and it picked up my linksys wireless card with out a problem too.

it definitely sounds like the driver has not loaded, maybe try "modprobe xirc2ps_cs".

steveland?

I think I've done all the things suggested here and nothing's worked...

It seems to stop eth0 as soon as it boots into Kubuntu...

Pretty sure I've done all I can with the Live CD, might just wait to borrow someone's memory stick and backup all the stuff I have on the laptop I want to save and wipe it and install some OS...

I'll report back when I have it installed.

Thanks for all the replies folks

Cake Fiend

Installing to the HD isn't going to give you much advantage over a Live CD tbh.

It could possibly be the desktop environment that's interfering with the ethernet interface. Try booting to a CLI only (type 'knoppix 2' at a knoppix prompt, probably 'ubuntu 2' or whatever at an ubuntu prompt) and see if that makes any difference.

As the OS loads, are you getting any messages about PCMCIA or ethernet scrolling by?

steveland?

niallb wrote:

Hi Steveland,
I think it's more likely that the PCMCIA slot is
not detected properly than the card itself.
Do you have any other PCMCIA cards to check?
Do you get a beep when you insert and remove it?
Does the beep sound happy ;-)

I had one of the older CPia models, and I think
I had to change the name for the pcmcia driver.
If the above looks like the slots not working,
I'll see if I can track down the old configuration.

Ubuntu is a good distro for such a beast.
You've plenty memory for it.
Debian might give you a wider choice of
development tools depending on what
programming you need to do.
Good luck with it,
NiallB

Can ya tell me more about renaming the PCMCIA driver?

No more PCMCIA cards to try (other than a wireless card which I can't use cos I don't have a wireless network at home... just use it in college)

I'm installing Ubuntu at the moment because of the abundance of CDs I have lying around

Any chance you'd still have that configuration lying around?

steveland?

OK, I've installed Ubuntu on the laptop and it's running grand apart from not being able to access the internet...

When I run ifconfig it tells me there's no eth0 and only displays lo

This leads me to believe what niallb mentioned about the slot not being detected...

I've had a look at Sico's link and found this:

2.1 How do I tell Linux what driver to use?

With most Linux distributions, the drivers exist as loadable modules, which are small binary files that are merged with the operating system at run time. A module gives the operating system (kernel) the information on how to control that particular ethernet card. The name of each module is listed in the heading of the section for each card in this document. Once you know the name of the module, you have to add it to the file /etc/modules.conf so Linux will know what module to load for your card. The syntax is typically as follows.

alias eth0 module_name
options module_name option1=value1 option2=value2 ...

The options line is typically only needed for older ISA hardware. For multiple card systems, additional lines with eth1, eth2 and so on are usually required.

The module files typically live in the directory /lib/modules/ which is further subdivided by kernel version (use uname -r) and subsystem (in this case net). These are put there by the distribution builder, or by the individual user when they run make modules_install after building their own kernel and modules (see the kernel howto for more details on building your own stuff).

If you build your own kernel, you have the option of having all the drivers merged with the kernel right then and there, rather than existing as separate files. When this is done, the drivers will detect the hardware at boot up. Options to the drivers are supplied by the kernel command line prior to boot (see BootPrompt Howto for more details). The user chooses what drivers are used during the make config step of building the kernel (again see the kernel howto).

It has the xirc2ps_cs driver installed anyway (it's there in /usr/src/yadayadayada... named xirc2ps_cs.ko)

modprobe did nothing.

I tried editing /etc/modules (it's modules not modules.conf) to include:

alias eth0 xirc2ps_cs
options xirc2ps_cs io=<something>

I don't know the actual physical address of the network card so I don't know what to put in there for the "io="

Anyone have any ideas on how to get the PCMCIA slot working or how to find out the physical address of the card/slot?

steveland?

Anyone

I'd love to get this up and running as soon as possible so I could do some programming before my Real Time Systems exam on Wednesday

tomk

I'm surprised nobody's asked for this already, but can you give us the output of lspci?

niallb

niallb wrote:

Do you have any other PCMCIA cards to check?
Do you get a beep when you insert and remove it?
Does the beep sound happy ;-)

How about answers to these?

type dmesg and look for lines containing cs:.
This may give you a clue - cs is card services

I suspect you'll see some bad news about "Yenta".
If you see Yenta: CardBus bridge found...
I'm probably on the wrong track.

In your /etc/defaults directory (assuming a debian type distro) you'll find a file called pcmcia.
Let us know what's in there too.
It will probably say "PCIC=yenta_socket"in there somewhere which covers most controllers.

PCMCIA support got damaged for older chipsets coming
in to the 2.4.x kernels, and still in 2.6.

On ye olde machine I needed to change yenta_socket to tcic.

Worth a try. Also try exchanging it with "i82365"
if tcic doesn't work.

NiallB

steveland?

I'm using the most recent version of Ubuntu (so yeh, Debian type OS)

Yeh it shows
Yenta: CardBus bridge found at 0000:00:03:01, devctl 0x66
Yenta: Using CSCINT to route CSC interrupts to PCI
Yenta: Routing CardBus interrupts to PCI
etc...

Do I still need to change the PCIC from yenta_socket to tcic or i82365 or will I leave it as yenta_socket?

Tried changing it from yenta_socket to tcic and no change, still won't show eth0 when running ifconfig

tomk:
lspci outputs:

0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp. 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX Host bridge (rev 03)
0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX AGP bridge (rev 03)
0000:00:03.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1225 (rev 01)
0000:00:03.1 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1225 (rev 01)
0000:00:07.0 Bridge: Intel Corp. 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ISA (rev 02)
0000:00:07.1 IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 IDE (rev 01)
0000:00:07.2 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 USB (rev 01)
0000:00:07.3 Bridge: Intel Corp. 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ACPI (rev 03)
0000:00:08.0 Multimedia audio controller: ESS Technology ES1983S Maestro-3i PCI Audio Accelerator (rev 10)
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Rage Mobility P/M AGP 2x (rev 64)

Hope this is helpful

steveland?

Yenta related lines from dmesg:

[4294714.183000] Yenta: CardBus bridge found at 0000:00:03.0 [1028:00bb]
[4294714.183000] Yenta: Using CSCINT to route CSC interrupts to PCI
[4294714.183000] Yenta: Routing CardBus interrupts to PCI
[4294714.183000] Yenta TI: socket 0000:00:03.0, mfunc 0x01261222, devctl 0x66
[4294714.404000] Yenta: ISA IRQ mask 0x0438, PCI irq 11
[4294714.428000] Yenta: CardBus bridge found at 0000:00:03.1 [1028:00bb]
[4294714.428000] Yenta: Using CSCINT to route CSC interrupts to PCI
[4294714.428000] Yenta: Routing CardBus interrupts to PCI
[4294714.428000] Yenta TI: socket 0000:00:03.1, mfunc 0x01261222, devctl 0x66
[4294714.649000] Yenta: ISA IRQ mask 0x0438, PCI irq 11

niallb

Do you get beeps though?
Do you have another card you can try?

Yenta looks right, but lots of people seem to have
had problems with the particular Texas Instruments PCI1225 chipset you mention.

Try going into the BIOS on your laptop and see does it
have any options for PCMCIA.Change to the alternate setting if you can and try again.

Good luck,
NiallB

steveland?

Nah no beeps or anything and no other card to try (have a wireless card I was trying to get working in college using ndiswrapper that it seems to pick up in that sit0 appeared alongside lo when I ran iwconfig)

I'll give the BIOS a try and see if there's anything to change

Edit:

OK, I've entered the BIOS and there's no mention of anything to do with PCMCIA... the only mention of anything that sounds relevant to this is Docking Configuration where I'm given the option of changing Docking IRQ to Optimized or IRQ 11 but I assume this is just for when you're using a docking station or something?

I'll try booting it with IRQ 11 and see what happens

niallb

Dell docking stations are great.
I have one with 2 PCI slots and a SCSI adapter.
They can need a lot of resources.
I doubt if this is your problem, but it shouldn't hurt.

No beeps sounds bad - if beep sound is working at all.

Did pcmcia get installed at all?
What do you get if you type dpkg -l pcmcia-cs?
Can you type /etc/init.d/pcmcia restart

NiallB

steveland?

sudo dpkg -l pcmcia-cs outputs:

Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Installed/Config-files/Unpacked/Failed-config/Half-installed
|/ Err?=(none)/Hold/Reinst-required/X=both-problems (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/Name                      Version                   Description
+++-==============-================-======================================
ii  pcmcia-cs                3.2.5- 11ubuntu8        PCMCIA Card Services for Linux

sudo /etc/init.d/pcmcia restart outputs:

* Shutting down PCMCIA services...
* Starting PCMCIA services...

When I have PCIC=tcic it says it can't find tcic when I restart PCMCIA, when it's yenta_socket or i82365 it doesn't give an error...

eth0 still won't show up in ifconfig though

Tbh I'm tempted to just install XP again and get rid of Linux altogether at this point

niallb

Might be best on that laptop.
Looks like you've one of the few that not only isn't supported out of the box,
but is generally trouble.

If you're still willing to have a go, I've two suggestions:

• Try Debian Sarge with kernel 2.4 and specify pcmcia-cs for PCMCIA support. This is the only one that will treat your pcmcia any differently, as it uses the originally seperate pcmcia driver package which was an alterative to the support built into the kerel for 2.4.x and upwards.
• Buy a USB to ethernet adapter - always handy to have around.
• Buy a USB wireless dongle. (OK, so kinda 2b)

NiallB