Dell Inspiron 8100 PCMCIA woes

Forum: Laptops
Topic: Dell Inspiron 8100 PCMCIA woes
started by: underdog5004

Posted by underdog5004 on May 05 2007,16:35

I did a HD install with 3.0.1 (I would have used a newer version, but I didn't have any blank cds around...) and when I booted from the cd, it froze on "starting cardmgr", so I rebooted with nopcmcia, which brought the system up fully. Then I did an HD install (my first one) and chose lilo as my bootloader. Now when I boot, it freezes on "PCMCIA found, starting cardmgr", which is not ideal. I don't want to just disable PCMCIA either, because I've got a really nice PCMCIA Orinoco Gold wireless card. Any ideas?

Posted by curaga on May 05 2007,16:50

Upgrading to 3.3.... Or replacing "quiet" with "debug" in the append line to see more messages, then locating the problem..

Posted by underdog5004 on May 05 2007,17:20

darn it, debug didn't give me any more info regarding cardmgr, I'll d/l the 3.3 iso today at work and give it a shot later on tonight. Thanks for the help.

Posted by underdog5004 on May 06 2007,00:16

darn, I got home from work today with dsl 3.3 burned, it booted, but hung on "PCMCIA found, starting cardmgr".
Any more ideas?

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on May 06 2007,16:43

Is it a power problem? (ie acpi=off , acpi=force , noapm noacpi etc.)
Is there an IRQ conflict?
I think some users booted with nopcmcia and then loaded the modules manually...

Posted by underdog5004 on May 06 2007,17:03

so...boot with nopcmcia then in .xinitrc have
modprobe pcmcia-cs &&
in it? I'm not totally sure about the correct modules to be loaded, though...
Thanks for all the help, it's been a while since I've used DSL for personal use...I use it all the time at the computer shop for data recovery.

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on May 06 2007,23:16

.xinitrc should be used only for X user apps... try /opt/bootlocal.sh instead.
Also, "&&" in shell scripting means "AND" ... you don't need it there (it'd probably cause a syntax error with nothing at the end).

It may be easier to boot with nopcmcia and test out which modules make it work first before placing it in a startup script.
You can look up which modules correspond to your device. I think you'll need orinoco_cs

Posted by underdog5004 on May 10 2007,02:22

I tried out DSL-N, and it seems to work perfectly. Thanks for everything, ^thehatsrule^.