Re: Getting my PCMCIA Serial card to work
Anders Andersson wrote:
> I like old PCMCIA cards, and would like to get a serial card to work
> on a Thinkpad X40 running Debian 12.5.
>
> The card is just called "Serial I/O PC Card" and should be physically
> and electrically compatible, 3.3V/5V, 16 bit. I think it is this:
> https://shop.ocr.ca/media/pdf/Socket-Mobile/srliopc.pdf
>
> It didn't immediately work when I inserted it, and instead of spending
> hours following the red herring down the rabbit hole I thought I
> should try asking here first for a change. This is what I get from
> dmesg:
>
> [ 331.059401] pcmcia_socket pcmcia_socket0: pccard: PCMCIA card
> inserted into slot 0
> [ 331.059429] pcmcia_socket pcmcia_socket0: cs: memory probe
> 0xd8200000-0xdf9fffff:
> [ 331.060446] excluding 0xd8980000-0xd90fffff 0xdaf00000-0xdb67ffff
> 0xdbe00000-0xdc57ffff 0xdcd00000-0xdd47ffff 0xddc00000-0xde37ffff
> 0xdeb00000-0xdf27ffff
> [ 331.068677] pcmcia (null): pcmcia: registering new device
> pcmcia(null) (IRQ: 3)
> [ 331.141504] orinoco 0.15 (David Gibson
> <hermes@gibson.dropbear.id.au>, Pavel Roskin <proski@gnu.org>, et al)
> [ 331.197037] spectrum_cs 0.0: Failed to initialize firmware (err = -16)
> [ 331.197062] spectrum_cs: orinoco_init() failed
>
> When I searched for "spectrum_cs" and "orinico" I got a lot of results
> for some PC Card WLAN interface, which isn't right. Does anyone
> recognize this? It should have a bog-standard 16550 compatible UART
> and PCMCIA is more or less an ISA bus so I did not foresee any
> problem. Is it perhaps incorrectly detecting my card as a WLAN card?
It is definitely recognizing your card incorrectly; I have a
couple of those orinocos about. (Lucent 802.11b wifi, the first
mass-market chipset for wifi. $150 each when they first came
out.)
This might be a useful doc for you -- in particular, section
4.4 on serial and modem devices:
https://tldp.org/HOWTO/PCMCIA-HOWTO-4.html
-dsr-
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