woody kernels do not support PCMCIA network card
Dear Debian Friends!
I tried various installations of Woody from a set of CDs which where created
around Nov 9, and found some problems, I would like to report in this manner.
The machine was an Inspiron-5000 Laptop, with a D-link-650 PCMCIA network card
(compatible to NE2000).
None of the Woody kernels I've tried recognised my network card, so I ended up
with the network unconfigured after install. After playing unsuccessfully with
the network setup, I tried recompiling a 2.2.19 kernel with PCMCIA support and
also a 2.4.10 kernel (with its own PCMCIA support) - with no more success.
Then I tried an install from scratch with a Potato-2.2R2 CD (kernel
2.2.18pre21) and it did recognise the D-link-650 network card fine, and
configured the network right!
Upgrading to woody did not change anything, the network still worked fine,
until I tried to upgrade the kernel too. I tried kernel packages 2.2.19
(vanilla), 2.2.19-???-ext3, 2.4.10-???-686, 2.4.12 (vanilla), installing them
with dselect. None of these kernels supported my PCMCIA based network card.
When I re-installed the old 2.2.18pre21 kernel, everything worked fine again.
Perhaps I missed something, but I would say, the newer kernels (including
2.2.19) have a broken module there somewhere in the pcmcia stuff.
- Josef
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