Xircom card and laptop

[kewlcat]

Thought I'd give it a shot here, even though I have tried through more "official" channels. My brand new laptop is an HP Omnibook 500, to which I have added a PCMCIA network card (Xircom CE3B-100BTX). The card is supported under Linux 2.4. I tried using it, but it wouldn' work at all. No error messages from kernel or PCMCIA utils, but no connectivity.

Read somewhere that bringing the eth0 interface up and down helps, and so I added a toggle_network line to my startup scripts, which brings the interface up and down 3 times. Now the card works after booting 75% of the time, but the other 25% of the time I have to use my toggle_network script 1 or more times after booting to get it to work. Needless to say, this is an annoyance.

I was wondering if any of you have had similar experiences, with this or other cards. Thanks for any help, and damned if this baby don't look good with Linux on it!

-Rahul

[Wombat]

You bought an HP..good job

The mistake was buying a Xircom. I happen to think that they are great cards, but the company hasn't done too well giving the Linux community the support it needs for their products to work well.

If you can return the card, I would.

[kewlcat]

Thats the plan!

Yep, I think I'm getting a 3Com with an X-Jack. Don't like dongles. When I get the 3Com and confirm that it works, out with the Xircom.

-Rahul

[kewlcat]

3Com works, of course

Just to let people know that the 3Com 3CXFE575CT card did work for me. Also, I learnt quite a bit about PCMCIA/Cardbus in the past week.

At least for me, the SMC Cardbus 8035TX and the Xircom CE3B-100BTX cards did not work (perfectly that is). The laptop would not boot with the SMC card inserted, although if I inserted the card after the POST sequence, it booted and the card worked correctly. The Xircom card as I said earlier would not work until I ifup'ed and ifdown'ed eth0 a few times.

-Rahul