[lug] PCMCIA Troubleshooting

[John Karns]

On Fri, 14 Dec 2001, Elyse Grasso said:

> Can someone point me at the best information for troubleshooting PCMCIA in
> laptops? I'm using KRUD (RedHat) 7.2 with the latest kernel, upgraded from
> various earlier versions of KRUD and RedHat.
>
> Minor mystery: during boot, a message from cardmgr appears on the screen
> complaining about line 8 of the ./config.opts file, but that message does not
> show up in the boot.log file or the messages file. Where else could it be
> going? (This message also appears on machines that were initally installed
> clean from the October KRUD distribution. Did the file format change with the
> 2.4 kernels and the opts file not get redone? Where could I find out about
> this?)
>
> Big problem: I have a bunch of Inspiron 2500 laptops at work on which cards
> that work on my personal laptop (an Inspiron 4000 that came with Linux
> configured and installed by Dell)  are not configured. I think that PCMCIA is
> having trouble identifying system resources that are safe to use. Is there
> detailed documentation on how to do this (for 2.4.x based distributions)
> available somewhere? I haven't found it by googling but may not be using the
> right searches. There seems to be a nasty interaction with apmd involved
> somehow, too. I think I'm going to be finding out way more about the guts of
> both Linux the machines and Linux than I really hoped I'd need to know.

I believe I've seen the same error, although it was quite some time ago.
I believe that I solved it by installing the pcmcia from the source pkg.

FWIW, on my Inspiron 8000, the kernel version of pcmcia hangs the machine
when trying to load, due to an incompatibility with the chip in the I8k.
It was necessary to install from the stand-alone source and answer 'yes'
to

Include PnP BIOS resource checking?

May have changed by now, but this option was not available in the kernel
version.  Although it doesn't seem like this is necessarily your problem,
there are one or two significant differences between the two pcmcia
distributions.  IIRC, the pcmcia docs mention that in case of troubles,
the non-kernel included version should be preferred, as it's more up to
date, and include a few more options.

You might want to rename your present pcmcia config file and pcmcia
modules dir to prevent overwriting until you're all set with the
re-install and have things working, then delete them later.

----------------------------------------------------------------
John Karns                                        jkarns at csd.net