How I got the PCMCIA ethernet card working

You can pretty much ignore anything i’ve mentioned previously on this subject apart from the excellent pcmcia article I found, which led me in the right direction. To summarise, you need to know what the machine recognises your card as, then add a simple card description to a config file telling the machine which driver to use. As it turned out I didn’t even need to install a driver.

It was actually a lot easier than I thought:-

1. I logged in as root and looked in var/log/messages to find out what my card was recognised as:-

“PCMCIA Fast-Ethernet”
manfid 0xffff, 0x1090

2. I then looked in etc/pcmcia/config and noticed that there were already several ASIX 88190 based cards in there which were using an already present driver called axnet_cs

3. I added the follwing card desription to etc/pcmcia/config:-

card “PCMCIA Fast-Ethernet”
version “PCMCIA”, “Fast-Ethernet”
manfid 0xffff, 0x1090
bind “axnet_cs”

4. Rebooted, and noted the absence of the “low” beep which I had before which was telling me it couldn’t find a driver.

5. Fired up konquerer and hey presto, I was on the internet. Note that I had already previously configured my internet connection to use PCMCIA and DHCP with my broadband connection