Viraj's Weblog

I have this pretty old IBM Thinkpad iSeries Type 1161-260 with a Celery processor. It's been sitting in my closet for about 6 months. I had attempted to run Linux on it at one point, but the Cardbus pcmcia interface on this laptop did not have good support so essentially no pc card worked. I spent alot of time hacking at it and eventually I gave up and left Windows XP on the system.

This weekend I thought maybe Linux these days has better support. It's a low end laptop with 192MB RAM. I wanted to run Ubuntu, but needed a lightweight version. That's when I found Xubuntu, a lean Ubuntu. I had about 3G free on my windows partition (a whopping 5G drive). I guessed correctly that Ubuntu must have a partition resizer that works well.

I downloaded the Xubuntu ISO on my Mac, burned it, and booted my Thinkpad. After some crunching, it came up to X with a live-CD like distro and an 'Install' icon on the desktop. Cool. I brought up a terminal and did an 'ifconfig -a' expecting to see only my loopback device. Lo and behold, I see an eth0. I think to myself, this can't be my wireless card. I then went to the graphical network configurator and saw that it detected my wireless card. A few clicks and I saw the open wireless networks (I keep mine open too . I was able to join, startup Firefox, and browse. My jaw dropped. Ubuntu out of the box on its installation live-CD has support for my wireless card that I could never get working for the life of me? I was very impressed. I had to start the installation.

After a long time I eventually had Xubuntu installed. I rebooted and found out that now my wireless card wasn't detected. Poking in /var/log/messages I saw:

cs: warning: no high memory space available!

Now this shit looks familiar, the same crap I had ages ago that I couldn't fix. So continued my hacking. I thought maybe some module loaded at full install and not in the live-CD was conflicting, maybe USB. So I sought to disable USB. Now times have changed and this is not as easy as just commenting it out in /etc/mod* files. I found /etc/modprobe.d/aliases and began fiddling with it. But for the life of me I could not get USB disabled. Even when I removed the kernel module file it would still get loaded!

This really baffled me. I thought maybe USB is compiled into the kernel. But that wasn't the case because I see it in a 'lsmod'. After much searching I realized that now distros use an initramfs, which is like an initrd but I believe you can store more. I looked at the current initramfs used during boot (via /boot/grub/menu.lst), which is a fun gzipped cpio archive:

mkdir /tmp/a
cd /tmp/a
gzip -dc /boot/initrd.img-2.6.15-26-386 | cpio -i

And whaddaya know, the usb kernel modules are stored in there. I found out about mkinitramfs (like mkinitrd), made a new one without usb, rebooted. But still my fucking wireless card didn't work. I went to sleep and decided to try again later. I was determined though because the damn thing worked on the live-CD, I have to be able to get it working installed! That would be really lame if I gave up now.

I spent some time searching, and found some references about pcmciautils replacing pcmcia-cs, and /etc/pcmcia being moved to /usr/share/pcmciautils. On my system /etc/pcmcia was empty. I booted the live-CD again and noticed that /etc/pcmcia had lots of config files, importantly a config.opts. On my installed system, this file was in /usr/share/pcmciautils. It contains info on memory regions to probe.

Then I found this German posting that seemed to be recommending copying config.opts to /etc/pcmcia. My 2 semesters of German came through, and I knew that 'alles wunderbar' meant something good. I copied the file, rebooted. Voila, my wireless card worked!

What a pain and such a simple fix! It's really lame this file is not automatically copied there, but I'm glad to have gotten it working. Where there is a will there is a way.