Conceptronic SP100TCL 10/100 MBit on a Dell Inspiron 8000

[manictuga]

HOWTO install a Conceptronic SP100TCL 10/100 MBit LAN PCMCIA card in a Dell Inspiron 8000 with Gentoo Linux 1.4

After a few hours of frustration and a lot of recompiling kernels and modules I managed to make my SP100TCL 32bit card work with 1.4 Gentoo distribution. Beware that, for some reason I don't yet know, you cannot 'hot-unplug' the card when everithing is working. Normally you're not willing to do so... Otherwise everything seams to be working fine. So, here's a roadbook to make it work:

1. Make sure you compiled the kernel !!!WHITHOUT!!! PCMCIA support.
> cd /usr/src/linux
> make menuconfig

Deselect: General setup -> PCMCIA/CardBus support -> PCMCIA/CardBus support

> make dep && make clean bzImage modules modules install
> cp /usr/src/linux/arch/i386/bzImage /boot/whatever-kernel-filename-you-are-using

2. After booting call "update-modules"

3. Install/emerge the "pcmcia-cs" package. After compilation/instalation you should find
in /lib/modules/your_kernel_version/pcmcia, among others:
- pcmcia_core.o
- i82365.o
- ds.o
- cb_enabler

4. Make sure that you remove '0x800-0x8ff' from /etc/pcmcia/config.opts so that, in the beginning,
the include ports line reads:

include port 0x100-0x4ff, port 0xc00-0xcff

This is extremely important otherwise PCMCIA code will hang.

5. Edit /etc/modules.autoload and insert the following lines:

pcmcia_core
i82365
ds

6. Download to a directory files 'kern_compat.h', 'pci-scan.h' and 'rtl8139.c' from
http://www.scyld.com/network/rtl8139.html and compile the module using:

> gcc -mcpu=i686 -DCARDBUS -DMODULE -D__KERNEL__ -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -O6
-I/usr/src/linux/include -c rtl8139.c -o realtek_cb.o -I/usr/src/linux/include/pcmcia

I've got a warning from one of the functions, don't worry about that.

copy the compiled module 'realtek_cb.o' to /lib/modules/your_kernel_version/pcmcia
and run 'update-modules'

7. Edit /etc/pcmcia/config and add the following lines:

#
# Device driver definitions
#
#
device "realtek_cb"
class "network" module "cb_enabler", "realtek_cb"

.
.
.

#
# Ethernet adapter definitions
#
card "100TCL CardBus 10/100 Ethernet"
manfid 0x0000, 0x021b
bind "realtek_cb"

8. Reboot your system

9. After logging, insert your Conceptronic LAN card and run:

> cardbus -f

10. Your PCMCIA card should have been recognized and the corresponding modules loaded.
Running 'lsmod' should show you something like this (apart from other loaded modules):

Module Size Used by Not tainted
realtek_cb 14752 2
cb_enabler 2896 2 [realtek_cb]
ds 7112 4 [cb_enabler]
i82365 27008 2
pcmcia_core 43584 0 [cb_enabler ds i82365]

11. If you use DHCP just run:

> dhcpcd eth0

For static setups (didn't try this one, just copied it from someone else :

Modify /etc/resolv.conf:

domain 'your.domain'
nameserver 'your.first.name.server'
nameserver 'your.second.name.server'
search 'your.first.domain.searchpath' 'your.second.domain.searchpath'

Then run the following commands:

> /sbin/ifconfig eth0 'your.fixed.ip' netmask 255.255.255.0
> /sbin/route add -net default gw 'your.gateway.ip' netmask 0.0.0.0 metric 1

12. Your network should hopefully be up and runing!!!


This procedure should work on other distributions like SUSE, Debian, etc, as long as you get
'pcmcia-cs' package and recompile the kernel without PCMCIA support.

Have fun!

Jorge