[TriLUG] good pcmcia card

[Tanner Lovelace]

On Tue, 2002-06-04 at 13:22, Jim wrote:

> Trying to install a Netgear FA511 and it's just not happy. Previously
> I had a 3Com card in that was working fine - I just got tired of
> dragging the dongle everywhere.
> 
> Digging around the google groups I see several posts regarding
> problems getting this card to work properly - so I'm considering
> taking it back and getting something else.

I am using a Netgear FA511a PCMCIA card and it works extremely well.
The only problems I've had are remembering that I need to do 
"cardctl eject" before taking it out (cardbus on linux apparently
doesn't like being just pulled out).  Other than that, it works
extremely well.

It uses the tulip network driver.  Here is the output from
lspci -v

01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Linksys Fast Ethernet 10/100 (rev 11)
        Subsystem: Netgear: Unknown device 511a
        Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 9
        I/O ports at 4000 [size=256]
        Memory at 10800000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1K]
        Expansion ROM at 10400000 [size=128K]
        Capabilities: [c0] Power Management version 2

Ignore the line that says Linksys and notice that on the
next line it does say it is a Netgear 511a.

And here is my output from lsmod (note this contains many more
modules that have nothing to do with the network...)

Module                  Size  Used by    Not tainted
nfs                    75388   9  (autoclean)
lockd                  49344   1  (autoclean) [nfs]
sunrpc                 62964   1  (autoclean) [nfs lockd]
sg                     30180   0  (autoclean) (unused)
st                     27316   0  (autoclean) (unused)
sr_mod                 15160   0  (autoclean) (unused)
sd_mod                 11644   0  (autoclean) (unused)
scsi_mod               92488   4  (autoclean) [sg st sr_mod sd_mod]
autofs4                 9252   2  (autoclean)
irtty                   5920   2  (autoclean)
irda                   90508   1  (autoclean) [irtty]
nm256_audio            67188   1
sound                  57292   1  [nm256_audio]
soundcore               4068   5  [sound]
ac97                    3344   0  [nm256_audio]
tulip                  40416   1
ds                      6848   2
yenta_socket            9344   2
pcmcia_core            41824   0  [ds yenta_socket]
af_packet              12488   0  (autoclean)
usb-uhci               21668   0  (unused)
usbcore                59072   1  [usb-uhci]
nls_iso8859-1           2816   1  (autoclean)
nls_cp850               3584   1  (autoclean)
vfat                    9788   1  (autoclean)
fat                    31384   0  (autoclean) [vfat]
supermount             62180   2  (autoclean)
rtc                     5912   0  (autoclean)
xfs                   502168   6
xfs_dmapi              34364   0  [xfs]
xfs_support             9208   0  [xfs xfs_dmapi]

My /etc/sysconfig/pcmcia file contains:

PCMCIA=yes
PCIC=yenta_socket

Also, make sure you have the latest version of the driver
from http://www.scyld.com/network/tulip.html.  Apparently,
there's a bit of a schism between Linus and Donald Becker
(who wrote the driver) and the latest versions have not
been going into the kernel tree.

If I think of anything else, I'll post it, but the card
works very well, at least for me.

Tanner
-- 
Tanner Lovelace | lovelace at wayfarer.org | http://wtl.wayfarer.org/
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