HP Pavilion ZE5400

[Brian Gannon]

I'm a linux developer/sysadmin so I bought this laptop more or less for that... I knew for a fact that the built in BCM94306 802.11 card wasn't going to work when i got it.. so i'm cool with that.. but the fact is.. the PCMCIA is not working at all.

The Card Manager comes up, loads the prism2 drivers and nothing... lsmod shows my card isn't being used (linksys v3). I can take the same card and go to a different laptop with the same config and it works.

Is there anything special with the ZE5400 that makes PCMCIA card services screwy?

Brian

[George_Dodds]

Have you tried http://www.linux-laptop.net/

They have some useful info or maybe redhat bugzilla.

Ta

George

[Bruce Copeland · Accepted solution]

PCMCIA has been an issue with most of the HP ze4000/5000 series. Some people report success using the pcmcia-cs packages. I suggest you try

http://tuxmobil.org/hp.html
http://linux-on-laptops.com/hp.html

and look for any reasonably close model that has successfully tested/used pcmcia.

Bruce

[Brian Gannon]

I found my problem
For some odd reason.. .the prism2 drives (but the ones in the kernel and the ones in wlan-ng) require that ISA be compiled into the kernel.

My thoughts were that ISA not onboard. But it ends up the prism drivers have some ISA code in them.. got me :)

Recompiled and wala... I have working PCMCIA via wireless... Although not on the BCM94306... which i won't expect a driver anytime soon. Broadcom has nothing to lose from releasing a driver... and won't even release white specs... so... we're pretty much SOL on that one unless I or someone else feels like reverse engineering the card. (which sounds like fun.. hehe)

Anyways.. thanks for the responses,
Brian