Laptop Linux Question

[mikebw at colossus.bilow.com (Mike Bilow)]

As you can probably tell, I am not a Red Hat fan.  I find it comparatively
difficult to use, at least to get it to do anything after installation. 
However, I have no intention of starting a distribution war here, and I
freely admit this is just a personal preference, not represented to be an
objective assertion.

When I speak of the "kernel," I speak of the canonical kernel as it is
released by Linus.  No distribution actually uses this canonical kernel
unmodified.  Some distributions, such as Debian, have formal mechanisms
for selecting which kernel patches you want implemented, both as the
source and binary level.

I did recently install Red Hat 6.1 on one of my laptops.  This was an IBM
ThinkPad 701CS, which has a 75 MHz 486 CPU, 16 MB RAM, and 720 MB HD.
This is not, therefore, a machine which is really used for anything on a
regular basis and I regard it as a test machine now.  I did get PCMCIA
support to a limited extent out of the box, but not APM at all.  I don't
know why there is APM in your installation but not in mine.  Perhaps we
selected different installation kernels?  I just took all the defaults.

-- Mike


On Sat, 8 Apr 2000, Jack Coats wrote:

> I have been using RH 6.1 on my laptop.  It came with PCMCIA and APM 
> already in the kernel.  The only problem I had was getting X to run right.
> But I even that got fixed eventually.
> 
> On Sat, 8 Apr 2000, Mike Bilow wrote:
> 
> > Start here:
> > 
> > 	http://pcmcia.sourceforge.org/
> > 
> > PCMCIA is not part of the kernel.  If you want PCMCIA, you have to add it
> > either as patches to kernel source (really just adding directories and
> > files) or you need to apply the appropriate package for your distribution.
> > For example, Debian has a package "pcmcia-cs" which adds core support and
> > "pcmcia-modules-x.x.x" (where "x.x.x" is your kernel version) which
> > provide binary support and "pcmcia-source" which provides source including
> > both kernel patch and non-kernel components.
> > 
> > The "ds" (Driver Services) module is simply a "super-client" that keeps
> > housekeeping data and intermediates between the hardware-specific driver
> > for your socket controller and the hardware-specific driver for you
> > particular cards.  If you want the extremely gory details, see the PCMCIA
> > Programmer's Guide:
> > 
> > 	http://pcmcia.sourceforge.org/ftp/doc/PCMCIA-PROG-7.html
> > 
> > You should not be doing "insmod" at all on these drivers.  If there is a
> > valid module dependency table (built by "depmod"), then you should use
> > "modprobe" instead.  In fact, "modprobe 3c574_cs" would likely be the
> > correct command to get where you want to go.  Note that, if you hard the
> > "cardmgr" daemon installed, it should process notifications about card
> > installations and removals and make the appropriate module changes.
> > 
> > Of course, since you're using Red Hat, I have no idea.
> > 
> > -- Mike
> > 
> > 
> > On Fri, 7 Apr 2000, Richard R. Malloy wrote:
> > 
> > > 
> > > Hello all,
> > > 
> > >     A week ago I installed RedHat 6.2 on my laptop (an AMS Tech AMD K6)
> > > .The only trouble I've had is with
> > > getting the 3Com 574B card to work.  The log says that the card is
> > > recognized and but I get an error with
> > > insmod  ds.o. I have 2 questions :
> > > 
> > >                 i) what is ds.o (it seems to load the 3c574_cs.o module)
> > > 
> > >                ii) If I want to build a version for my laptop on my PII
> > > system, where do I configure the pcmcia card stuff?
> > >                     I didn't see anything in the xconfig setup that
> > > configured pcmcia cards and stuff! What am I missing?


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