PCMCIA wireless on kernel 2.6
Hi all,
I'm in the process of reinstalling Debian on my old laptop (Dell
Inspiron 3500), and I'm having trouble getting wireless to work.
I have installed the version of sarge-i386-netinst (the minimal CD for
testing) that was current two weeks ago. This installation comes with a
2.6.7 kernel. I didn't make any major modifications to the system, but
exactly the same problem persists with a freshly-built 2.6.8 kernel.
When I plug my SMC 2632W wireless PCMCIA card into the laptop, the
system prints a pithy
cs: memory probe 0xa0000000-0xa0ffffff: clean.
and does nothing else. The system does realise that there's a PCMCIA
card there: "cardctl status" prints
5V 16-bit PC Card
function 0: [ready], [bat low]
As far as I understand the documentation, the 2632W should be supported
by the orinoco_cs driver. (It's the old version of the card, of circa
2001 or so, not the new Atmel based one.) This driver is built, and I
can load it with modprobe, but to no further effect.
I'm using the yenta driver for the PCMCIA subsystem itself. This driver
loads ok, according to the boot messages, although I'm not entirely sure
that I have a yenta socket. In my previous (kernel 2.4) installation of
the same laptop, the PCMCIA driver was some "i.....", where ... was some
string of numbers. lspci reports the PCMCIA controller as "CardBus
bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1220 (rev 02)".
The yenta driver can't be all wrong, though, because my cardbus
Tulip-based ethernet card is recognised and loaded properly (up to the
point that I can see the network interface with ifconfig).
I'm thoroughly confused about the whole process of detecting PCMCIA
cards and loading the appropriate modules in Linux 2.6, and I can't find
any documentation that would explain how to fix my problem.
Can somebody help me out with this? I'd be happy to send you config
files and debugging output, only I don't know what to put here and I
don't want to spam the list more than necessary.
Thanks in advance,
Alexander.
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