Since I never received any reply to my previous request for determining how to get a PCMCIA installation to work, I decided to figure out how to do it myself. I took the latest boot and bootnet images from cooker and from Redhat and took a look inside them. The solution turned out to be a trivial change, but nevertheless took a lot of pain to discover. The cooker pcmcia.img, mounted with mount -o loop pcmcia.img /mnt contains two files, pcmcia.img and pcmcia.cgz. For some reason these contain more or less the same files and if you empty the .cgz file, it seems to make no difference to the install. The .img file contains various static binaries and scripts that need to be made available to start pcmcia card services. The culprit: etc/pcmcia/network must exit with 0 in order for cardmgr to accept that the network card was successfully initialised. Since the supplied script attempts to run others that are not accessible, nor are required (ifup, which calls many other scripts), the script fails. Changing this script to immediately exit 0 allows cardmgr to accept success and the install to continue. Since the install determines the IP address using other means, ifup is not required. Finally, after attempts over months to install Mandrake, I'm on the way to installation. I don't think Redhat's pcmcia installation support is particularly good, in fact I think it is a crock, Mandrake's however is even worse. Cheers, Paul
