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
