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Xref: sserve comp.os.linux.misc:10982 comp.unix.bsd:13606 Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!hookup!news.moneng.mei.com!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!MathWorks.Com!yeshua.marcam.com!charnel!xmission!u.cc.utah.edu!cs.weber.edu!terry From: terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert) Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: Notebook - PCMCIA Date: 15 Mar 1994 01:14:54 GMT Organization: Weber State University, Ogden, UT Lines: 53 Message-ID: <2m326e$ipu@u.cc.utah.edu> References: <2lm8ok$ssr@news.nynexst.com> <2lp2t9$r73@u.cc.utah.edu> <2m1bfj$ptg@rzsun02.rrz.uni-hamburg.de> NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.weber.edu In article <2m1bfj$ptg@rzsun02.rrz.uni-hamburg.de> andrae@rzdspc2.informatik.uni-hamburg.de (Caroline Andrae) writes: >|> >Have you tried to put your notebook on a network with a PCMCIA ethernet >|> >card? ME> Works great; all you need is a PCMCIA enabler shim, which is very few lines ME> of code to write, especially if you have doc's for PCMCIA. Most of the ME> network cards are NE2000 compatible. Should take you half an hour. ME> ME> It also works with anything else PCMCIA if you code things right (or one ME> network card exactly if you do it wrong), including FAX modems and SCSI ME> interfaces for things like tape drives. 8-). >Could you please explain, or post the thing you wrote? I can't post code for well known reasons, or we'd have had Sun-style shared libraries in June of 93 (...er; without C++ support) and have Streams and run Xenix and UNIX binaries today, etc. I can tell you what I did to get the information needed, though. The first thing I did was notice that Kurt Mahan wrote something like it for UnixWare, which meant it was possible. 8-). Then I bought a copy of "Undocumented DOS, Second edition" and started disassembling the PCMCIA BIOS calls documented there to see what they did to do PCMCIA'ish things (this is the same book that talks about the EISA bus signature word for identifying EISA bus machines to turn off bounce-buffers, which are not applicable to EISA). This will get you enough to attach cards on startup, although there's little else you can do in line with the standard. Most recently, I've called up Intel and asked for documentation for the chipset. Each chip can handle two cards, and most machines have only one chip. The chip lets you map an interrupt and up to four address windows onto what it expects to be an ISA bus on the other side. You get to pick where they go. An attach is a determination of device type, a lookup of the driver, and a mapping matching the driver settings for the device. The attach should be done before the probes go. This is sufficient to get most ethernet cards for PCMCIA running, since they mostly all look like NE2000's. I'll hack more on the thing when I get the Intel docs (thanks to Kurt who pointed me at them) and can borrow the laptop again with a couple of different types of cards. I suspect getting a SCSI interface up will be quite a chore for the attach requirements. Terry Lambert terry@cs.weber.edu --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.