# PCMCIA Frustration

## marthisdil

OK, I've done most everything under the sun in order to get Gentoo to recognize my PCMCIA on my Dell Lattitude CPtS laptop.  Installation from the Stage 1 ISO goes flawlessly, pcmcia is recognized and the network works using the PCMCIA drivers, etc on the install ISO.  However, after compiling the kernel, and rebooting, it doesn't work.  Compiling with PCMCIA in and out of the kernel doesn't matter.

It makes no sense...anyone else have any ideas?

Jason

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## novice

i was in the same situation a few days a go (numerous times with built-in and numerous time as modules) with zero luck. if you haven't got yours to work, try this approach.

- run make menuconfig as usual

- uncheck the pcmcia/cardbus option 

- configure the rest of the stuff like you have been doing

- finish running make dep, make clean, make bzImage, etc

- run emerge pcmcia-cs 

- run rc-update add pcmcia default

- complete the rest of the installation

it works for me (just finished mine and rebooted, now my nic is up and humming ' :Very Happy: '

btw, i got mine working just from reading the many tips/suggestions from this forum.. thanks ppl... 

could someone tell me how long does it take to emerge kde? just curious. i plan to leave it on overnight.

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## credmp

What NIC do you have? I had a 3c575 and it borked on me with just pure pcmcia-cs package. I had to use the kernel module. also you might want to see if you put all you need in modules.autoload (pcmcia-code i82365 ds) and that pcmcia is added to default runlevel if you use just pcmcia-cs

-- Arjen

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## novice

credmp,

i have 3c574 nic. i tried with pcmcia/cardbus as built-in and 3c574 as built-in, then as module. in either cases, my nic was not up. when i attempted to mimic the installation steps (insmod pcmcia-core, insmod i82365, etc), i got error message like modules not found or something like that. i read the pcmcia-howto, ethernet-howto but did not get any resolution until yesterday when i read the post "pcmcia-cs instructions for Gentoo users" by chadh. i gave it a shot and sure enough, on reboot, my nic was up and running.

i am still trying to get a better understanding of the process of hardware installation (detection, configuration, etc) in the linux world. i am sure to run into alot of frustration, but the reward is sweet. and that's what count the most  :Smile: 

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## marthisdil

Hey guys - I finally got my Laptop working - the gory details are listed in the following link:

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=7331

What I ended up doing, in a nutshell, was a FRESH install. When it came time to configure the kernel options, I configured it without PCMCIA/CardBus support and WITHOUT support for the network card.  I then compiled the kernal, etc.  Once done, did an emerge pcmcia-cs.  Made sure that the /etc/init.d/net was configured right, and that /etc/conf.d/pcmcia looked ok (made the net script use dhcp for eth0).

Then, I rebooted, logged in.  There was no network support (as there shouldn't have been).

I then did:

insmod pcmcia_core

insmod i82365

insmod ds

cardmgr -f

And my network card came to life, the net script got an ip address, and all was good.

Chad then told me to add the i82365 and ds entries into /etc/modules.autoload, and do an rc-update add pcmcia default so the pcmcia_core would get loaded, did those, rebooted, and wham, networking up on boot.

Hope this helps everyone a little.

Jason

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## marthisdil

 *novice wrote:*   

> could someone tell me how long does it take to emerge kde? just curious. i plan to leave it on overnight.

   After I got networking working, I started the KDE merge shortly after midnight the other night.  It completed compiling X and KDE a bit before 1PM the same day - this was on my Dell laptop with a celeron 500 processor and 256MB of memory.

Jason

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## novice

Jason, 

thanks for the info. i started the emerge kde process last night around 11:30 or so; it was still running when i left for work this morning. i have a compaq armada 1750 pii 400 with 128MB ram. i hope it finished by the time i get home.

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## aych

i have an ibm x20 500 celeron 120 ram... its been going at it for around 20 hrs.. and still has 82 packages to do

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## Frozensun

 *aych wrote:*   

> i have an ibm x20 500 celeron 120 ram... its been going at it for around 20 hrs.. and still has 82 packages to do

 

something that helps is to run this

```
emerge kde -pv
```

the p is for pretend, the v is for verbose

it will show which flags it uses with a +flag such as +jpeg

if you 

```
nano /etc/make.conf
```

use can change flags in the USE=" " variable to add or remove use flags, which can reduce packages used in compiling for things you don't need

I cut my kde install down from 60 packages to around 30...

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## volospin

This only works with kernel 2.4.xx, right?

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