Red Hat 9 PCMCIA Weirdness

So, to the point, I decided to blow away the Mandrake partition on my work laptop (a Compaq EvoN610c) and load RH9 on it. This Evo has never ran Linux very well, there is some strangeness, and what not with certain things, but I didn't pick it. Any ways, the install went rather well, and Kudzu even picked up my sound card, video card, WinModem (yuck), et. al. However, for whatever reason, it did not load up PCMCIA support... ugh.

I did a little searching on the Internet and found that this is apparently a common problem. Most posts I found told the poster to fix one of the init scrips, by removing the .o in lines 117-119 of /etc/rc.d/init.d/pcmcia. That didn't work for me, so I did some more digging and found this:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/54605

I decided to compile pcmcia-cs (3.2.4) from source, and sure enough that seemed to fix it. I did a make install instead of a make all becuase of a warning that Configure gave me, so heads up for that (it may still work with a make all, not sure). Any how, it took me longer to download the tarball then it did to configure, compile, and install.

I had already modified /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts with my information from before, so I did a service pcmcia restart and sure enough it came up with no problem. Now, the one thing I was worried about was RH's Network Config program, and if it would prevent me from properly configuring the wireless card. So, I rebooted, and sure enough it doesn't work. I think this is due to RH using their "user friendly" network configurion program. So, I pulled that up and set it up within that app (don't forget if you're using an RG, you need to put 0x and your security string).

Now I'm happily using my Orinoco WIFI card on my RH 9 machine.

Hope this helps out someone... :)

Created by swannie on 2003-08-07 12:46:57, modified by swannie on 2003-09-30 16:42:24.
Modify Page