Re: Installation/network card problem - FIXED but annoying.
Hello all,
A few weeks ago, I got an Xircom CardBus Ethernet 10/100 PCMCIA card
off eBay. I had an old Etch unstable netinst CD lying about, so I
installed Etch on my old laptop using the CD, installing over the
network without any problems. Now work has given me an old Dell
Inspiron 2500 laptop and I need to put Debian on it. I have
installed XP on the Dell laptop and it works perfectly fine with the
network card. Now it's time to install Debian onto the Dell. I
couldn't find the CD, so I downloaded a fresh copy of the latest
netinst installer image and burnt it onto CD. The disc label is
"Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 r0 "Etch" - Official i386 NETINST Binary-1
20070407-11:29" The Dell laptop booted up fine, and it detected the
network card:
<snip>
I asked my manager for his spare PCMICA card, and funnily enough, it
looked the exact same, but actually differed very slightly - the one
I have is:
Xircom Realport Cardbus Ethernet 10/100 model number RBE-100
The one he gave me is:
Xircom Realport Ethernet 10/100 model number RE-100
The only difference is that mine is "Cardbus" the other isn't.
Anyway the gist of it all, is that the one he gave me works perfect.
I'm sure Linux did spot the difference because with my card, it said:
kernel: xircom cardbus adaptor found, registering as eth0, using irq5
I do not understand why my card with my old P2 266 laptop would work
perfect with Debian Etch but not the same card in a Dell Inspiron
with the *same* operating system and kernel, and a slightly different
card would work fine? I mean, the Cardbus card works perfectly fine
in the Inspiron with Windows XP. In Linux, my server *did* get DHCP
requests and sent it back, but for some reason the laptop wasn't
picking it up?
Faulty driver with a strange combination?
Thanks!
Piers
Reply to: