Netgear PCMCIA fast ethernet (fa511)
I thought I would post a message on how I got a Netgear PCMCIA fast
ethernet (fa511) card to work with Debian Woody and a 2.4 kernel.
These are the steps I took to get it working using 2.4.20 kernel modules
and not the pcmcia-cs package. (You do not need the pcmcia-cs package
at all and I don't have it installed.)
1. Compile a kernel with the following:
General Setup --> PCMCIA/CardBus support -->
<M> PCMCIA/CardBus support
[*] CardBus support
Network Device Support --> Ethernet (10 or 100Mbit) -->
[*] Ethernet (10 or 100Mbit)
[*] EISA, VLB, PCI and on board controllers
<M> DECchip Tulip (dc21x4x) PCI support
2. Install the kernel and modules and reboot.
3. Create a file /etc/modutils/netgear with the following:
-- snip --
# Load pcmcia_core, yenta_socket and ds modules before tulip module.
#below tulip pcmcia_core yenta_socket ds
pre-install tulip insmod pcmcia_core && insmod yenta_socket && insmod ds
# eth0 is the Netgear fast ethernet PCMCIA card.
alias eth0 tulip
-- end snip --
4. Update your /etc/modules.conf file by running:
update-modules
Nb. For some reason the "below" command didn't work as expected from
reading the modules.conf man page. If anyone can tell me why I would be
grateful as this seems like it would be a cleaner method than the
pre-install line I used in the end.
5. Create a /etc/network/interfaces file with appropriate configurations
like:
-- snip --auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.0.2
netmask 255.255.255.0
up route add default gw 192.168.0.1
-- end snip --
6. Then simply doing ifup eth0 and ifdown eth0 will bring up and take
down the interface as it should.
Note that I didn't include a post-remove line in the
/etc/modutils/netgear file since you may not want to remove the
pcmcia_core and yenta_socket etc. if you have other pcmcia cards using
it. Simple to add it if you want.
Hopefully this will help someone else. I was certainly confused into
thinking that I needed the pcmcia-cs package even with 2.4 kernels. I
know that you can still take this approach with 2.4 kernels but I wanted
to make use of the 2.4 kernel modules available.
Regards.
Mark.
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