I have an older laptop manufactured by Hyperdata, with a busted CD-rom and I want to install Suse on it. Thus the reason for using an FTP install. I downloaded the bootdisk and modules 1 and 4 and using rawrite put them onto floppies. Suse boots up just fine, I go into manual insatallation and go to install modules. I select PCMCIA Modules give it the mod 4 disk, it works a bit and comes back with a dialogue box saying
"Please enter specific parameters for chipset "yenta_socket" "

I have no clue what this is asking for... and if I just hit enter it beeps and says "failed to load module "yenta_socket"! "

I have a Sky Link Express PCMCIA 10baseT network card installed in the system.

Thanks for your help, and please let me know if you need anymore info!

-MattTail

yenta_socket is the driver for the pcmcia slot itself. They ditched support in yenta for a lot of really old bridges... or its just an ISA bus pcmcia bridge that needs ancient options.

Its looking for stuff that normally goes under: CORE_OPTS in whatever pcmcia config file specifc to your system. I think suse has there's normally in /etc/sysconfig/pcmcia If you want to look at that, but usually its just blank with no examples in the comments. The pcmcia-cs soureforge page is probably the best bet, but the first thing you need to find out is the exact pcmcia bridge you've got on there. I hate to say this, but boot the 4 floppy annoyance, get to a tty, usually by hitting: ctrl+alt+f2, and then trying the command:

lspci

or...

/sbin/lspci

or...

cat /proc/pci

And look for the Bridge controller name. Write that thing down, then look him up on SF and go ahead and post it back here. Hope it isn't a Cirrus bridge.

Cheers,

Finegan

I boot in the boot disk that I created, and upon request give it module 1 disk and let that finish, then I'm at the main menu. When I press ctrl-alt-F2 I get a blank screen with a flashing curson at the upper left hand corrner and I can't type anything, escape does nothing, all I can do is turn the power off.

I have a previous install of win9x on the system that I might be able to use to help get info for the controler... but I don't know where to find it. thanks!

Somewhere during the floppy boot process its got to tell you, press alt+ctrl+blah for a shell, or rescue terminal, or terminal, or something. You could've gotten back to the menu with ctrl+alt+F1, probably just with alt+f1 actually... Linux normally boots with 6 ttys and even the installers will start all 6... sometimes.

In windows... keeerap, start,options,control panel, system, then look in the tree for the pcmcia controller itself. I think... Model name and number is important.

That info may also be in BIOS.

Cheers,

Finegan

Figuerd out how to get the system information... load into Suse, go to Main Menu item "System information" *feels a little foolish*

Which says it's a PCMCIA bridge O2 Micro, INC. OZ6730 (all of the "O"s are letters execpt the very last one whcich is a number)

I found this on pcmicia-cs.sourceforge
http://pcmcia-cs.sourceforge.net/ftp/PCMCIA-HOWTO
which says that it is supprted... I even went so far as to download the zip file http://pcmcia-cs.sourceforge.net/ftp...s-3.2.7.tar.gz but I don't see anything there that makes sense to me.

What it boils down to is that I don't really understnad exactly what kind of information I am looking for.

Thanks again for your help!

No you got it, there is something goofy as far as I remember with the O2 micro bridge, I researched one of these for LQ about a year and a half ago... what's the make, model, blah on the laptop itself? Hyperdata sounds like a "lets clone a Dell" company. There's something simple behind this, but I just can't remember.

I'll check back soon.

Cheers,

Finegan

Got it:

http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/lin...06.1/0803.html

Alright, to explain...

Around 2 years ago they moved all of the pcmcia modules from an external to kernel package called pcmcia-cs, which you downloaded, into the kernel proper, and therefore changed also how many of them worked... some older ones either require freak hacks like the above, or just got dumped entirely.

With an 02 bridge there's another way to get it assigned memory from BIOS properly. There might be an option in BIOS. Check in there to see if you can change the pcmcia mode or somesuch chatter. The prepacked IBMs and Dells that shipped with this have stripped down "hide all the fun crap" BIOSes, but I'm suspecting that this little no name shipped with a full Award or Phoenix Bios. The 4 floppy boot festival between tries is going to get tedious I know...

The other options, Debian still uses pcmcia-cs in their stable distro: 3.0r2 is current I think. Also, the BSDs all handle memory properly if you ever wanted to make that leap. Its what I've had to do with my old cirrus machines that aren't covered under the in-kernel module: yenta_socket.

Cheers,

Finegan