I got curious and did a google search on '3Com Corporation 3c556B Hurricane CardBus'. One of the things turned up was:
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I posted this information on the forum without any response. The network card in my IBM Thinkpad A21m is a 3Com 556B mini PCI combo card (ethernet & modem). I have no interest in the modem side... (dumb winmodem) but the ethernet adapter worked OK in Knoppix 3.2 & 3.3. I checked the 3c59x.o driver's file size and it is the same in 3.3 and 3.4 so I'm guessing that it hasn't changed. Something has however as it is detected differently. Here is the output of lspci -v from the laptop under 3.3 and 3.4. Does anyone have any idea what changed to cause this to fail?
Knoppix 3.3 initialises the card correctly (3Com Corporation 3c556B Hurricane CardBus) and I get an IP address from the dhcp server. However the card is not detected correctly in Knoppix 3.4 (3Com Corporation 3c556B CardBus [Tornado]). This results in a MAC address of FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF.
Thanks in advance. Dallas
Try booting with
knoppix acpi=off
and/or noapic
Maybe your board has (as many do) a faulty ACPI implementation that requires ACPI support to be turned off in the Kernel.
******************************************* Sounds like yours. The response was: ******************************************* Thanks Klaus,
knoppix acpi=off
did the trick.
Regards Dallas *******************************************
Worth a shot.
Doug
I am sending this mail from my Thinkpad. IT WORKS! The one thing I hadn't tried was turning acpi and apic off, as Doug suggested above. I did it one at a time. I edited /etc/grub/menu.lst to add acpi=off to the linux boot line, and for the first time I got a proper mac address for the pcmcia card (not the FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF thing I got before). But still no network. I turned the firewall off, but no change...ping gave this response, as before: "connect: Network is unreachable" I was going to mail the list to report some headway but not success, and then I thought, well, I haven't tried noapic, so I added that to the menu.lst file and rebooted. And bingo, here I am surfing the web! I want to say a BIG thanks to everyone who gave me their thoughts. As I read through the posts on this list I can see it is a great community. I hope this thread is of some value to others. I wonder, in my ignorance, if some of the bootup and other peripherals problems (floppy drives, etc.) I'm reading about in the list couldn't be helped by turning apic and/or acpi off. And perhaps we should let the kernel guys know that there may be a problem with apic or acpi. Any suggestions on that? Thanks, Paul