after i installed shrike and rebooted on my inspiron 8100, i configured my linksys wireless net card, everything worked fine. in order to trim down my kernel and modules, i did my typical make xconfig, got rid of whatever i didn't need, rebooted and ... no PCMCIA. no cardmgr, no mention of "pcmcia" in /proc/devices, no pcmcia_core.o module listed by "lsmod". nothing. i went back and made sure i hadn't deselected anything critical. everything looked fine, i had selected all of the required PCMCIA components. after a while of head-scratching, i finally started from absolute scratch, and rebuilt a new kernel using the default red hat settings as they are shipped (with the one exception that i built ext3 support into the kernel, that's all). took a while but i assumed that, when i was done, i would have reproduced the kernel and modules as they were shipped from red hat. still got the same problem -- even a build using the shipped default i386 config does not build a kernel and modules that build in pcmcia support at boot time. and here's the puzzling part. the stock /lib/modules/2.4.20-8 directory has all of the pcmcia drivers further down under the "kernel" directory -- they get loaded fine. a *new* build places a "pcmcia" directory in the top level of the new modules directory, full of symlinks. should this be expected to make a difference? it just seems a bit odd. here's an excerpt from /var/log/messages from one of those non-PCMCIA boots: Apr 3 18:53:01 localhost pcmcia: Starting PCMCIA services: Apr 3 18:53:02 localhost kernel: hda: IC25T048ATDA05-0, ATA DISK drive Apr 3 18:53:02 localhost cardmgr[640]: starting, version is 3.1.31 Apr 3 18:53:02 localhost kernel: hdb: TOSHIBA CD-RW/DVD-ROM SD-R2102, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive Apr 3 18:53:02 localhost pcmcia: modules cardmgr. Apr 3 18:52:59 localhost sysctl: kernel.sysrq = 0 Apr 3 18:53:02 localhost kernel: blk: queue c03e6360, I/O limit 4095Mb (mask 0xffffffff) Apr 3 18:53:02 localhost cardmgr[640]: no pcmcia driver in /proc/devices Apr 3 18:53:02 localhost pcmcia: modprobe: Can't locate module pcmcia_core.o Apr 3 18:52:59 localhost sysctl: kernel.core_uses_pid = 1 Apr 3 18:53:02 localhost kernel: ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14 Apr 3 18:53:02 localhost cardmgr[640]: exiting Apr 3 18:53:02 localhost pcmcia: modprobe: Can't locate module yenta_socket.o Apr 3 18:52:59 localhost network: Setting network parameters: succeeded Apr 3 18:53:02 localhost kernel: hda: host protected area => 1 Apr 3 18:53:02 localhost pcmcia: modprobe: Can't locate module ds.o Apr 3 18:53:02 localhost kernel: hda: 93759120 sectors (48005 MB) w/1806KiB Cache, CHS=5836/255/63, UDMA(100) Apr 3 18:53:02 localhost rc: Starting pcmcia: succeeded any hints? can anyone else reproduce this? rday
