[FC2] PCMCIA network cards starting on boot

[Scot L. Harris]

On Sun, 2004-06-13 at 11:35, D. D. Brierton wrote:
> I installed FC2 yesterday. Very nice it is too. However, I was somewhat
> thrown by my Wi-Fi PCMCIA card failing to start on boot, until after
> much searching through the lists I found a post (which I now can't find
> again so I can't refer to it) explaining that the solution was to
> deselect the "Activate device when computer starts" option in the
> network configuration tool, and instead just let the PCMCIA card
> services start it. That does indeed do the trick.
> 
> However, I wondered what the status of this behaviour is. Is it a bug?
> On my system (Dell Inspiron 8200 with Dell badged Intersil Prism 2
> 802.11b PCMCIA card) selecting "activate device when computer starts"
> seemed to completely stop the PCMCIA services from doing anything with
> the Prism 2 card at all -- the status light never comes on, and it was
> impossible to bring the network interface up manually. If this is not
> considered a bug then I believe the part of either Anaconda or Firstboot
> which asks you which network interfaces you want started at boot should
> be altered so that network interfaces which are on a PCMCIA card are not
> listed and some simple explanation of this is displayed. What do others
> think?

I was plagued by this problem also until someone on the list provided
this solution.  

I see it as a bug.  I can imagine that someone out there may have more
than one pcmcia based network card in their system.  With the current
work around they would not be able to specify which interface they
wanted to have active on boot.

The fix would have to be somewhere in the code that defers the startup
of the network interface until after the pcmcia services are started. 
Either that or the order of starting pcmcia before network services
needs to be changed. 

-- 
Scot L. Harris
webid at cfl.rr.com

The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.