Newbie: RH9 (Fedora) laptop PCMCIA networking "removed"

Hello,

Problem: I have "broken" and am trying to re-instate PCMCIA ethernet
support on my Linux laptop.

A little bit of context. I have IBM T21 laptop/ Fedora (RH9) and
two PCMCIA NICs: Xircom #CE3-10/100 and NetGear MA400. The end target
is to get the NetGear wireless card working - but that way lie
dragons.

Originally after first install of RH9, with the Gnome
network-configurator I noticed a "kind of" Plug and Play with the
network cards in that when I inserted and removed the cards they
"appeared and disappeared" on the GUI display. However, the NetGear
MA400 NIC seemed to be "associated" with a Xircom driver - anyway
that's for a later posting.

At this time the Xircom was working fine over CAT5 and I could Web
browse and e-mail etc. from Linux.

To try and get the MA400 working, I downloaded the pcmcia-cs and
wlan-ng tars/packages from the NetGear site. I followed (blindly) the
instructions on make - and saw lots of error messages through this
process.

The end result is the Gnome network-configurator cannot now "see"
either PCMCIA NIC. I have looked in /etc/modules.conf and can see an
entry for eth0 - but there my knowledge stops.

I have looked at the Ethernet HOWTO - but it seems geared towards
ISA and PCI cards.

ifconfig command only shows "lo" not "eth0".

One good ray of hope is that I have booted from the distribution
CDROM Disk 1 and "rescue" detects the Xircom card. If I let the setup
process find the IP address using DHCP this all seems to work in that
I can PING the card's assigned address and the DHCP server IP address.
However, this is a temporary fix - when I reboot the "standard" Linux
build from hard disk (not CD) I guess the appropriate config files
have not been updated permannetly and the eth0 is not "visible".

I'm sure this setup/correction is documented somewhere - but I
can't find it. I would be grateful if someone could point me at the
correct documentation so I can reconnect over CAT5 and then resume my
investigation to get the MA400 wireless NIC to connect to the NetGear
router - and then the world

Regards

Clive

Further info

If I boot from Fedora CD-Rom disk 1 and enter "linux rescue" with
BOTH Xircom and Netgear cards inserted in the PCMCIA slots, then the
network detection routines detects BOTH cards as eth0 (unnamed) and
eth1 (Xircom Ce3). If I perform a "ifconfig" from the command line
then both cards eth0 and eth1 are displayed with separate MAC
addresses. I can PING the IP addresses (.4 and .6) of both cards and
ping both a .1 (router) and .10 (print server) address on the same
subnet as these two NICs. Hence, I am confident the base distribution
can support these NICs.

Is there any way I can run this detection routine under my current
installed distribution that will update the necessary config files
and allow me to use either or both NICs?

Additional info: if I run linux rescue with ONLY the NetGear WLAN
card inserted, the start up fails with "termination signal 11". If I
run linux rescue with ONLY the Xircom card inserted, then linux starts
up and the card operates fine as eth0.


Regards

Clive

>> Hello,

>> Problem: I have "broken" and am trying to re-instate PCMCIA
ethernet
>> support on my Linux laptop.

All,

As I do not know how to fix this problem, although I feel it could
be corrected with a config change, I decided to re-install Fedora /
RedHat.

Two new problems.

First attempt at re-install - I think the Anaconda installer was
only trying to install UPDATED packages - so in fact nothing new was
installed - and the NIC problem remained.

Second (and subsequent) re-install attempts, the install is aborted
early on and a "media check" indicates the install CD-Rom is corrupt
or damaged - which is bizarre because I have used it at least 10 times
since initial install to run the "linux rescue" mentioned in early
posts.

Do I just have to put this corrupt disk down to bad luck a reburn
the Disk1 image on to a new CDR? Or is something else going on here?

Any suggestions for a different Linux distribution as I find the
install process of Fedora "inflexible". The replacement of the GnoRPM
package installer with the new one, a fantastically retrograde step.
The Fedora package installer forces one to install new packages that
are not part of the standard Fedora "package profile" through the
command line. Also I have had Fedora completely freeze up in
operation. I downloaded the latest ISO images from the Fedora site as
the start point.

Thanks,


Clive

>
> All,
>
> As I do not know how to fix this problem, although I feel it could
> be corrected with a config change, I decided to re-install Fedora /
> RedHat.
>
> Two new problems.
>
> First attempt at re-install - I think the Anaconda installer was
> only trying to install UPDATED packages - so in fact nothing new was
> installed - and the NIC problem remained.
>
> Second (and subsequent) re-install attempts, the install is aborted
> early on and a "media check" indicates the install CD-Rom is corrupt

Problem (sort of) fixed

1. Re-burned Disk1 ISO image to CD-R. This disk read with no media
errors

2. Complete re-install of Fedora to the Linux ext3 partitions.

3. The install has detected both the wireless NIC (eth0) and the
Xircom "wired" NIC. The Xircom has some initialisation - and I am
using the NetGear wireless NIC now - to be honest I thought the
problems with the NICs would be the other way round. To be subject of
a different search / posting on news group.

Problems

Although I thought I was very careful about the placement of the boot
loader, on first boot I got "LI" then a freeze.

I fixed by booting from the Win XP install disk, going to recovery
console and rebuilding the MBR (master boot record). I always thought
that once in WinXP I could run BootMAgic to create a "boot option" to
the Linux / Fedora partition. This works in that the boot goes "Via"
GRUB boot loader. I need to configure GRUB so that it automatically
starts Linux rahter than giving me anothe roption to start WinXp. So
OS selection will be done initially using BootMagic.

Next job - set up print server and fix the Xircom "wired" NIC

Clive