Hola, I've got this old laptop that I'm bringing back from the dead (attic) for a special project. It needs sound and network capability. As it's a 300MHz PII, and I'm running gentoo on the 3GHz home server, I thought the optimizations of gentoo might pay off.
First, I did a stage 3 install. Everything went fine until I lost the network connection. Nothing I did could bring it back. However, it always worked with the Universal 2005.0/1 disks, so there was nothing wrong with the hardware. I went with a stage 1 install, This worked for a couple weeks, while I spent time getting all the tweaks done. Then I popped in a Cisco Aironet 350, thinking I could make the laptop mobile. All networking died. Rebooting, no help. Rebuilding kernel with no Aironet support, no help. Loading an older kernel with networking yes, sound no, still broke. The network card I've used is a 3Com 3c589D. Upon boot with the 2.6.13-gentoo-r3 kernel, it was detected and assign it's correct static IP. Further inspection indicated that it had no route, and I could not add the route. Apparently, there might be an issue with the yenta_socket module and ACPI. At least, that's what the Google searches indicate. So, after a full day and a half of banging my head against the wall, I tried using 2.6.12-gentoo-r10 sources. I make menuconfig, make && make modules_install and the damn thing works upon reboot. Again, this is a software issue only. Using the Universal install CD, or even Fedora, everything works fine. So here's the hardware IBM Thinkpad 770X (8MB Video Ram) 256MB RAM 3Com 3c589D pcmcia network card -- Modules for pcmcia card 3c589_cs pcmcia yenta_socket rsrc_nonstatic pcmcia_core Kernel 2.6.13-gentoo-r3 worked for a long time. Once it stopped working, it stopped working forever (or until I figure it out). Problem seems to be with IRQ issues, as this is what I saw in /var/log/messages Oct 30 14:57:46 tux Yenta TI: socket 0000:00:02.0 no PCI interrupts. Fish. Please report. Oct 30 14:57:46 tux Yenta: no PCI IRQ, CardBus support disabled for this socket. Oct 30 14:57:46 tux Yenta: check your BIOS CardBus, BIOS IRQ or ACPI settings. Oct 30 14:57:46 tux Yenta: ISA IRQ mask 0x0498, PCI irq 0 --- and other like this.... Oct 30 11:46:04 tux cardmgr[15669]: socket 1: 3Com 589 Ethernet Oct 30 11:46:04 tux eth0: 3Com 3c589, io 0x300, irq 3, hw_addr 00:60:08:25:40:E0 Oct 30 11:46:04 tux 8K FIFO split 5:3 Rx:Tx, auto xcvr Oct 30 11:46:25 tux eth0: flipped to 10baseT Oct 30 11:46:37 tux eth0: interrupt(s) dropped! Any help will be greatly appreciated. Peter -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list