Gentoo: making your pcmcia ethernet card work.

Problem:
On my old laptop (a 700Mhz Pentium III and 128MB RAM - Toshiba Satellite 2800-200DVD) I installed Gentoo Linux, but I encoutered problems with my pcmcia ethernet card.

I made the steps explained in this guide:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/…&chap=7 

but after the reboot my kernel didn’t recognize my pcmcia card.

Solution:

I assume you have followed all the steps described in the guide above.

  1. pcmcia-cs must be installed:
    emerge pcmcia
  2. launch it as a service at every boot:
    rc-update add pcmcia boot
  3. make sure the appropriate modules are loaded when the computer boots:
    nano -w /etc/modules.autoload
    here insert the module that worked during your gentoo installation. It is ‘i82365′ or ‘i82092′, just watch it with installation cd using ‘lsmod‘, then insert it (without quotes) into modules.autoload as a new line.

  4. Configure your network as described in Gentoo Installation guide.

  5. Reboot.

  6. See if your ethernet card is recognized doing a:

    ifconfig

  7. if you can see it (eth0 for example), you did it!
  8. if not, pheraps you haven’t configured well your network. To test:

    ifconfig eth0 up

    if you can see ‘eth0′ with an ‘ifconfig’ command, your pcmcia card is recognized.