Re: PCMCIA, performance, Open Office

On Thursday 25 September 2003 07:19 pm, Jeff Muse wrote:
> 1) On at least three distributions (Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE),
> starting card services hangs laptops. I've seen this on laptops from
> Toshiba, Dell, and HP. You need to use an interactive startup or a
> boot disk to disable pcmcia so you can even get to a prompt. I've had
> this problem occur over the course of several years, so it doesn't
> seem to have gotten much attention.

It's true that you can load drivers (like PCMCIA) that lock up the 
system hard.  Current versions of RedHat allow you to select 
"interactive" startup where you can step through the startup scripts to 
help figure out what is causing the problem.  This still isn't very 
friendly to the non-expert, but it's still more control than Windoze 
gives you.

Or, you can boot "single user"; but most people don't know how to do 
that or what to do once they get there.  The RedHat install disk 
doubles as a rescue boot disk if you need it.

I have had bad audio drivers cause incredible problems before (much 
worse than PCMCIA).

PCMCIA/pccard support under Linux can have problems depending on just 
how the system hardware is setup.  You shouldn't have to do anything to 
get support under current distributions.  Sometimes you have to play 
with /etc/pcmcia/config.opts for your system.  All these configuration 
problems could be easily set by the hardware vendors if they choose to 
(that's what happens with Windoze).

A lot of this has to do with the fact that PCMCIA/PCCARD support is not 
at all standardized.  If the hardware acted right all the time, then 
Linux would have no trouble.

>
> Once you get the system to boot, you might need to build a new
> version of pcmcia-cs. I've also noticed that networking starts before
> pcmcia does...but I've got a PCMCIA NIC, so I re-ordered the startup
> scripts.

You shouldn't have to do this.  The network setup should simply fail, 
but everything gets started once it sees the PCMCIA card.  You get some 
scary warnings, but they are harmless.  Not very friendly, is it?

It would be nice if Linux could do the "boot to last good configuration" 
that Windoze does.  Windoze can do this because all configuration is 
kept in the registry.  However, this has lots of bad side effects (it's 
why you have to reboot 4 times during an install).

-Dan