Getting my NetGear MA401RA WLAN PCMICA card to work...

[Pyke]

This is just to tell how I got my WLAN PCMCIA card to work with my ASUS L8400 laptop. Maybe others can benefit from my experiences.

I started out following all the guidelines in the forums. Almost all of them said "Don't compile PCMCIA support into the kernel. Use the drivers supplied with pcmcia-cs instead". I tried every possible combination of settings in the kernel to get this to work. No luck

After very much reading and more than 10 recompiles of the kernel I tried to do the exact opposite - compile PCMCIA support into the kernel. So I compiled everything in as modules - all the drivers etc. And then it worked like a bliss After emerging cardmgr and rebooting, cardmgr recognised my card and loaded the right drivers (yenta_socket for the bridge, orinoco for the card).

Just to inform others that you shouldn't necessarily not compile the kernel without PCMCIA and cardbus support.

/Pyke

[soulwarrior]

just a short question

Which package must one emerge, to get just the cardmgr utility without the drivers?

[Pyke]

Hi soulwarrior

If you have PCMCIA support and drivers compiled into the kernel then just emerge pcmcia-cs to get the cardmgr utilities.

Also, I had to include pcmcia_core before yenta_socket in my /etc/modules.autoload to get it to work - otherwise yenta_socket would not load.

/Pyke

[soulwarrior]

Hello Pike,

Thank you, this did point me in the right direction:

Hi soulwarrior

If you have PCMCIA support and drivers compiled into the kernel then just emerge pcmcia-cs to get the cardmgr utilities.

Also, I had to include pcmcia_core before yenta_socket in my /etc/modules.autoload to get it to work - otherwise yenta_socket would not load.

/Pyke

I only had to add yenta_socket to modules.autoload.

But there was another problem, when I started /etc/init.d/pcmcia, dmesg posted something like:

RequestIRQ: Ressource in use

I had to make sure I enabled ISA bus support in the kernel, then it did work .