[Nottingham] Mandrake 10, PCMCIA cards missing on boot?

[David Aldred]

Just when I thought I'd got all my networking and laptop stuff sorted...

For the last week, I've had Linux/XP networking going well, sharing 
fine, even printing to the printer on one of the XP machines.  Solved 
the Linux end first, then worked out how to stop XP grinding slower and 
slower then crashing if I pinged it by machine name (also a fix at the 
Linux end - more entries in the hosts file).

I was using the laptop elsewhere today, and took out the wireless card 
before leaving home so that it wouldn't get knocked.  Started up the 
laptop without it, got a warning that a card was missing, and let the 
thing boot without doing anything to the configuration.  No problems at 
that stage since I didn't want a network.

Got home, put the card back in, and switched on - expecting the hardware 
check to throw up a change on boot.  It didn't.  Not only that, but when 
boot was complete the machine didn't seem to think it had any network 
cards at all, and the KDE PCMCIA said 'no PCMCIA controller detected'.


Looking back to how I got things working before, I did the following:

$  modprobe yenta_socket

This because the PCMCIA device listed under 'hardware' identifies itself 
as using yenta_socket

$  service pcmcia restart

To get the system to look again at PCMCIA.  Now it knows it's got 
sockets.

Then I run my usual script to get the card configured for my wireless 
network, and off we go.


However, re-booting leads to a repetition of the problem - the boot 
process still doesn't identify any new hardware, and still fails to sow 
any network cards on completion.

Of course, I can just add the modprobe and pcmcia restart to my network 
connection script - but I don't know *why* this is happening and it's 
annoying me!

Any suggestions or solutions?

Incidentally, if I want to automatically run that script at the end of 
the boot process, where should I put it / call it from?


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