[Nottingham] Card repeatedly needs configuration on startup?

[David Aldred]

Hello, again.

One annoyance with my present setup (well, with the Linux end - the Win 
XP end is being no end of a pain, but that's another matter!).

Every second time I start up the laptop, the startup routine gets as far 
as the 'checking for new hardware' bit, and then "recognises" that I've 
got a new ethernet card in.  I haven't: it's the same card combination 
as last time.  If I reject the suggestion that I might like to enter the 
configuration routine, it won't then recognise either the ethernet card 
or the wireless card, and a reboot is needed to get either going[1]: if 
I accept the suggestion and go through the configuration dialogues it 
all works nicely.

    [1] Perversely, on the latest startup I did whilst composing this
        email, I hit the 'cancel' button by mistake, but the wireless
        card still worked afterwards.  Ho hum.....

On the other times, it thinks I've removed a card instead.  On these 
occasions it again offers the configuration option, and the results are 
as above.

This means I can't just switch it on and ignore it while it starts up!

Any suggestions? And is there a log of the boot which might help tucked 
away somewhere in directory tree?

[I suspect this may be something to do with the wireless card, which is 
in a pcmcia slot.  However, I can't configure the wireless card at that 
stage of the startup as I'm using ndiswrapper, and none of the native 
Linux drivers for wireless cards works - so the probe stage of setting 
up a new card can't be used. As long as I complete the configuration for 
the ordinary lan card at the startup when it asks me to, everything 
works.

As far as the Mandrake hardware set-up is concerned, the lan card and 
the wireless card share a name - it thinks they are both a Xircom card, 
which is the lan card.  However it will quite happily address the two 
separately as eth0 and wlan0.  This may be because it's trying to get 
the wireless card set up on boot, and I'm perforce giving it the details 
for the lan card].

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|\avid Aldred   / David at familyaldred.org.uk  \   Nottingham, England
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