Re: Debian's PCMCIA support is weak and buggy
Enrique Zanardi <ezanardi@molec2.dfis.ull.es> writes:
> The bad news are that I haven't thought about PCMCIA support in our boot
> procedure until reading your message, so I guess you won't find any
Well, at least those creative juices are flowing now :-)
> difference in the first (alpha state) version of the new boot floppies,
> that I plan to upload to experimental before this weekend.
Cool.
> The good news are that if you give me some advice, I will try to improve
> that support for the next revision of the boot floppies, and perhaps we
> will have something working for Debian 2.0.
I'll certainly do anything I can to help. I think that what we need
is this:
* WORKING pcmcia-cs and pcmcia-modules. They don't necessarily work
as packaged. (eg, pcmcia-source won't compile pcmcia-modules for
2.0.33, and I don't know why anybody would want 2.0.32 instead of
2.0.33). Bo's seemed to be totally hosed, but hamm's will work
with a bit of coaxing.
* A "PCMCIA setup" option in the install program, BEFORE device
driver setup. For those with SCSI-on-PCMCIA, this should also be
before partitioning the disk. This could be as simple as just
running the /etc/init.d/pcmcia start script, but there are configs
that may need to be tweaked on a per-machine basis. The defaults
just happen to work on my machine :-)
Also, more things should be compiled as modules
because any device attached to PCMCIA must be inserted as a module
after the PCMCIA card is inserted. Note, this means SCSI too.
The one I ran into was network, which I think will be much more
common than SCSI (and easier to deal with).
* Correct initial configuration of the base system, including
starting card services before loading modules or poking around
with the network.
* APM support in the kernel. Bad Things can happen, for instance,
if a laptop goes into standby while doing the install unless the
kernel understands APM.
Thanks,
John
--
John Goerzen
Southwind Internet Access, Inc,
Business e-mail: jgoerzen@southwind.net
Personal e-mail: jgoerzen@complete.org
Wichita State University e-mail: jgoerzen@cs.twsu.edu
Developer, Debian GNU/Linux <http://www.debian.org>
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