Fedora Users — Re: Hang at boot: Compaq Presario 800

David Muse wrote:

You may run into difficulty with the cardbus (pcmcia slot)
later though.  Apparantly, the 2.4 kernels do something
differently than the 2.2 kernels and the cardbus never
gets initialized.  When I bought my laptop, I was running
redhat 6.2 and everything worked fine.  When I upgraded
to 7.0, the cardbus stopped working.  I tried everything
and the only thing that I can get to work is to keep a
stripped down redhat 6.2 installation in a small partition
on the hard drive, boot to it when I power-on the laptop,
then reboot (without powering down the laptop) into
fedora.  Apparantly, the 2.2 kernel initializes the cardbus
and it retains it's initialized state across the reboot as
long as the laptop isn't powered off.

If anyone else out there has this laptop and has a different
solution for making the cardbus work, I'd love to hear about
it.

I have a Compaq 1205US, and I had to change the pcmcia startup script to run later in the boot process (IIRC). I got the info from:

   http://www.linuxlaptops.org

The document I used is now a bad link. I did find something that may be of interest to you (looking at a doc on the Presario 900):


     PCMCIA:

As it turns out, my problem with PCMCIA lay in the fact that for whatever reason, my /etc/sysconfig/pcmcia file was not configured correctly. Consequently, when RH loaded the pcmcia service, it disabled itself. Others may experience this problem--a sure sign is to get memory config errors when running cardctl ident. These errors stem from not having cardmgr running! To fix it, I had to edit the /etc/sysconfig/pcmcia file to say PCMCIA=yes and PCIC=i82365 and resave the file. After running /etc/init.d/pcmcia restart, I promptly had WIFI working. In case anyone is interested, I used the excellent guide by Loran at linux.oldcrank.com/tips/wpc11 <http://linux.oldcrank.com/tips/wpc11/> to get it working. With the updated hermes.conf file, all of my wireless cards were recognized. Also, my Cisco Aironet 350 card worked without as much as a single change to the conf files.


     Hope this helps.