Hi!
I'm wondering which modules to load and how, and in which order to get
my Asix AX88190 PCMCIA NIC work on my laptop. Any help is greatly
appreciated!
I earlier sent a mail with the subject "Installing woody on a Dell
Inspiron 5000e laptop", but got no answer. I thought I was not specific
enough and have looked into this further a lot, now again asking for help:
What I'm trying to do is basically bring up my network for installing
debian on my laptop. I can load modules but am unable to bring up eth0.
Currently, I'm a bit confused as to which drivers to try (well, I tried
them all, but with no success).
The card is (according to windows) based on RealTek 8139 chip, but the
(crappy) linux installation instructions on CD say it's an Asix AX88190
(which might well be an 8139). What is confusing about his is that the
driver on the CD are: Cardbus/rtl8139 driver and PCMCIA/8390 and
(perhaps slightly modified) pcnet_cs.
On debian-boot I was recommended the 8390 driver for a 8139 PCMCIA card,
but I still was unable to bring up eth0.
Redhat does this by loading yenta_socket, mii, and 8139too. None of
these are in the debian dist. (Well, 8139too is, but compiled into the
kernel). I earlier had Redhat 7.3 on my laptop, and it worked very well,
but I never got to understand how it did it, as everything was automagic
during the install.
The 2.4.18 kernel sources say my card is almost compatible with NE2000
but "because of some misfeatures need an own driver, called axnet_cs"
(freely quoted).
So I've tried everything available on bf2.4 (as the 2.2 kernel has been
problematic on this laptop). Also, the vanilla disks do not help me as
when I load the 8130too driver it says "network down" when trying to get
DHCP configuration.
I think you might want to know that I'm not totally familiar with the
differences between CardBus and PCMCIA.
OK - I think you might get a little better help on -laptop, but I'll
give it a go. Basically, the kernel needs to be able to see your
Cardbus bridge (the thing that the PCMCIA cards actually plug into) and
then needs to recognize your card.
You'll need the cardbus support built into the kernel (which I think it
is in debian stock kernels, although I'm not sure - I tend to roll my
own) and then you'll need the modules for your card. There are usually
two, one with and one without the _cs ending. For me:
steve:~$ /sbin/lsmod
Module Size Used by Not tainted
orinoco_cs 4904 1
orinoco 33544 0 [orinoco_cs]
My understanding (admittedly low-end) is that the orinoco driver is
written for all cards with my chipset, and the orinoco_cs contains the
extra information needed only by the PCMCIA versions of these cards.
Once you have the driver level set up, you'll need the pcmcia-cs
package installed, as that has all the necessary software to get the
card actually recognized and running. I think there's a way to do it
without this package, but I could never get it to work, and it runs
effortlesly with it. YMMV. After all that, you'll have to set up the
networking itself - put the correct information in interfaces, and so
on.
HTH,
Steve