Slackware Linux 4 (2.2.6) on AcerNote Light 350 PC and Xircom RealPort 10/100 16 bit

Specifications of the Machine

Thanks to Mark, Jim, Ken, Keith, I am now able to use Xircom RealPort 16 bit 10/100 on a AcerNote Light 350 (very old machine, yes, but functional :-). No hardcoding of IP address is needed, and I didn't have to upgrade the kernal to 2.2.10.

Thanks to all who help developed the PCMCIA driver for Linux! Big thanks to Ken!

Also thanks to Kurt Huwig for the specs of the AcerNote Light and providing a vote of confidence that it can be done :-).

It took me 3 days, but it was well worth the effort.

Best regards!

--- chialing
    at
    geocities
    dot 
    com

Check out my MS thesis from UIUC :-).

• Chia-Ling Lee, "On run-time systems for parallel supercomputers," M.S. thesis, Dept. of Electrical Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, May 1990.

Steps Taken

1. Partitioned 775 MB harddisk using FIPS into two partitions. Boot from diskettes (bare.i and color.gz from Slackware 4) and create a Linux partition (/dev/hda2) and a DOS partition (/dev/hda3) and a swap partition (/dev/hda4). All are primary partitions. I gave 250 MB for /dev/hda1, 200 MB for /dev/hda2 and 250+ for /dev/hda3, and swap space of 64 MB for /dev/hda4.
2. Xircom Realport 16 bit 10/100 works fine using Win95. From Win 95, copy the entire /slakware directory into the DOS partition.
3. Boot from diskette, install from /dev/hda3 and /slakware and got Linux 2.2.6 running with Xwindows. Configured with network. Green light is on, but link light is never on. Can ping localhost, ifconfig without errors, lsmod shows module loaded and device IRQ is 3 (5 didn't work either).
4. Download pcmcia-cs-3.0.9.tar.gz into the DOS partition from ftp://hyper.stanford.edu/pub/pcmcia/

   I have also downloaded pcmcia-cs-3.0.13.tar.gz previously, but that did not work since I did not apply the patch; not sure if it will work if I apply Ken's patch to 3.0.13.

   Also download xir2ps_cs.c.gz (it is actually a c file) from ftp://www.hsp.de/pub/xirc2ps_cs.c.gz, but could not get it to work because the xirc2ps_cs.c in pcmcia-cs-3.0.9.tar.gz is version1.31 and the downloaded file is 1.30.

5. Manually edit /etc/pcmcia/config.opts and /usr/src/pcmcia-cs-3.0.9/clients/xirc2ps_cs.c
6. cd /usr/src/pcmcia-cs-3.0.9;
7. make config (accept all defaults)
8. make all
9. make install
10. reboot
11. Viola!