miniPCI card detected as PCMCIA

26 Jan 2004

      I've got a Toshiba Satellite 5205-S504 with SuSE 9 working fairly
well on it.  I've got the MiniPCI WiFi upgrade card installed.  It does
not in Linux.

Yast detects it, but as a PCMCIA card. Trying to start the card manually
via a terminal with the init.d script and the "hotplug" option does not
work.

I have installed the SuSE sysconfig patch (that fixes some wifi
behavior) and the proper kernel module (orinoco) is loaded.

If I navigate to "/etc/sysconfig/network/" and rename
"ifcfg-wlan-pcmcia" to "ifcfg-eth1", do some editing to make it look the
way it should (onboot, wireless='yes', etc...), and restart the network,
  the following happens:

-eth1 waits for DHCP for a while, then starts "backgrounding"
-checking the network status, the proper wireless info is
displayed,showing the presence of the access point etc...
-immediately below the wireless info, it shows that eth1 is dead
-also, there is an error stating a difference in versions of "Wireless
Extensions"

below is the output of '/etc/init.d/network status':

---------------begin excerpt------------------
Checking network interfaces:
   lo                                                               running
   eth0                                                             running
Warning: Driver for device eth1 has been compiled with version 15
of Wireless Extension, while this program is using version 16.
Some things may be broken...

eth1      IEEE 802.11-DS  ESSID:"linksys"  Nickname:"PortaBox"
         Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.437GHz  Access Point: 00:06:25:A4:A6:06
         Bit Rate:11Mb/s   Tx-Power=15 dBm   Sensitivity:1/242700000
         Retry limit:4   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
         Encryption key:XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX
         Power Management:off
         Link Quality:61/1  Signal level:-34 dBm  Noise level:-95 dBm
         Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
         Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

   eth1                                                             dead
   ppp0                                                             unused

-----------------end excerpt-------------------

I realize that I should rebuild the driver with version 16 of wireless
extensions, but most troublesome to me is that the card is detected as
PCMCIA.  This is the only MiniPCI card I've ever dealt with, but this
isn't normal, right?

Any idea of what's going on?

Thanks in advance,
Bruce

miniPCI card detected as PCMCIA

Bruce Bertrand