Mission impossible: PCMCIA Compact Flash Card Reader

[tam]

Fighting since 3 days, I'm almost giving up. I've read may howtos and instructions, but nothing worked for me.

I have a IBM Thinkpad T23 with Gentoo 2.40.20-r2 and want to use my PCMCIA Compact Flash Card Reader.

Anyone around here who is successfully running a CF reader?

[phirst]

Yep, I just got the CF slot on my thinkpad X20 working...

Suggest you elaborate here on where you start to encounter problems - a rough overview might be:

build suitable kernel
emerge pcmcia_cs
/etc/init.d/pcmcia start
insert CF card.



For me, the problem was in the definition of "suitable" for the kernel. The non obvious bit that got me was where it mentions in http://pcmcia-cs.sourceforge.net/ftp/doc/PCMCIA-HOWTO-2.html#ss2.2 that you need to have CONFIG_HOTPLUG, CONFIG_PCMCIA and CONFIG_CARDBUS enabled (fair enough), then mentions as an afterthought that on i386 architecture, you also have to have CONFIG_ISA enabled. (Riiight, an ISA bus, obviously )

Anyway, I enabled CONFIG_ISA, re-built kernel, plugged the card in and it all worked fine.

That was with kernel 2.4.21-pre6 by the way, will test with 2.4.20 and 2.5.66 later...

I also found that my module dependencies got a bit messed up somehow, so modprobe (and hence the pcmcia startup scripts) failed to load in the correct modules. To do this manually, you should be able to do:

modprobe pcmcia_core
modprobe yenta_socket
modprobe ds

Hope this helps!

Paul.

[tam]

I don't have ISA enabled. Hopefully this will help. I'm gonna try this later today since I don't have access to my Notebook right now.

[tam]

Yes! It works. You saved my life.