kernel, pcmcia-cs and wireless madness

[Xhosa]

I have just got hold of an orinoco gold wireless card to play with on my laptop. When I booted the laptop with the LiveCD, cardmgr loads the following modules and the card works properly:

pcmcia_core
yenta_socket
ds
orinoco_cs

Booting the laptop normally, I decided to emulate this configuration. My standard kernel build had pcmcia/cardbus disabled, but had Wireless Support enabled (but no card drivers loaded). The default modules loading when I run cardmgr are:

pcmcia_core
i82365
ds

and then it stops without loading the card. Manually doing modprobe orinoco_cs doesn't help, as cardmgr doesn't use it when I run cardmgr -f. (although it loads my 'wired' network card happily, which also worked under the liveCD).

My assumption from this is that I needed to replace i82365 with yenta_socket. I discovered that yenta_socket is created when you build the kernel with pcmcia/cardbus support enabled.

This I duly did, but did not select any card modules (wireless as before) and then emerged pcmcia-cs to get the card modules. However, it complained that pcmcia was enabled in the kernel, and only installed the cardmgr tools (no modules).

So third option - I rebuilt the kernel with every possible pcmcia/wireless option loaded/selected as modules, and emerged pcmcia-cs jsut to get cardmgr. I now get yenta_socket and the correct orinoco_cs module as before , but for some reason there is no ds.o. Pcmcia-cs once again refuses to supply any modules.

My kernel is vanilla-sources 2.4.20
pcmcia-cs is 3.2.1-r4

I know the card works under gentoo (works with the liveCD), but I can't get any combination of kernel compile and pcmcia-cs to provide me with the modules I need.

Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong before I throw my machine out? (Rebuilding the kernel on a P300 laptop takes the best part of an hour, and after around 7 separate attempts I'm getting suicidal!)

[Xhosa]

Well, I'm trying a few different things right now (development kernel, development pcmcia-cs) to see if I can get round the problems I've been having.

I'll add two questions to my problem above:

Is it possible to get yenta_socket.o as a module without enabling cardbus/pcmcia support in the kernel?

Is it possible to force pcmcia-cs to install its own modules, even if it detects pcmcia support in the kernel?

Here's hoping....

[Xhosa]

OK, so its generally considered madness to speak to yourself, but I've finally (after a week) solved this one....

It ws nothing to do with kernels, modules etc as far as I can tell (although i did have to tweak the kernel a bit to get all the modules etc I needed).

No, the problem was cuased by an old install of linux-wlan-ng which I did a few weeks ago when I first got gentoo installed. I subsequently did emerge -C linux-wlan-ng, but the file wlan-ng.conf remained in /etc/pcmcia. It was this file, and not /etc/pcmcia/config that cardmgr was reading the module-card binding options from. I only noticed this when I rebooted and saw a line 'modprobe -r prism2_cs' which seemed odd. Changing the card bind from prism2_cs to orinoco_cs fixed everything.

I'll shut up now...