# Making pcmcia work with 1.4rc2

## jcw

Here's some info which might be of use to adjust the installation instructions for 1.4rc2 (x86, Dell Inspiron 5000):

- I used a stage3 install, for Pentium III, with GRP's

- startup and install went essentially just fine

- my network is an Orinoco wlan card, i.e. PCMCIA

- instructions for PCMCIA worked like a charm

The trouble was getting the whole thing to work cleanly once installed and using the rebuilt kernel (gentoo-sources).

It turns out that I had to get all the following things right before things would work cleanly without any errors:

- be sure to emerge pcmcia-cs while installing, and the net is available

- do *not* enable PCMCIA in the kernel (hence no modules)

- once rebooted, do "emerge pcmcia-cs" again, as told in the docs

- add "i82365" to /etc/modules.autoload (and run update-modules)

   (failing to do this causes pcmcia startup to fail on "modprobe ds")

- do *not* add net.eth0 to the runlevels

- add pcmcia instead: "rc-update add pcmcia default"

The logic for this is that the installation docs seems to be confusing things a bit: the proper way is to force pcmcia to launch on startup, and have *it* figure out what to do with cards it sees in there.  The docs were trying to do things the other way around: forcing pcmcia to be inited, cards and all, before the startup scripts try activiating eth0 as part of the starup sequence.

IOW - make the system boot up with pcmcia fully working, and let pcmcia's card manager deal with what happens to be in the slots.  That way, the network will go up and down as the card is detected (and switching to another type of network card works too), and will boot without any errors regardless of whether a card is present or not.

Also got rid of a "Hermes already inited" msg that simply did not make sense.

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## sygma

I found your post very useful in getting pcmcia services working on my 1.4rc2 install.  I dug around the system for a while to try to figure out why i82365 seemed to need manual loading, and I found a solution.  If you edit  /etc/conf.d/pcmcia and make the following changes, i82365 will be automatically loaded by the pcmcia init script:

change

```

PCIC=""

```

to

```

PCIC="i82365"

```

This change tells the card services which pcmcia drivers are to be used.  If it's left as "", then the driver must be loaded manually, as you illustrated in your post. 

Hope this helps!  

Wes

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## chadh

Yeah, I used to have a sticky post in the laptop forum with pretty much those exact instructions.  if you search for "pcmcia instructions" and my nick, it should come up.  The installation docs are definitely confusing, which is why I wrote the original post (I am the pcmcia-cs ebuild author).  Respecting the PCIC variable and automatically loading modules is a fairly recent development, by the way.

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