PC Card / PCMCIA

From Gentoo Linux Wiki

This article is part of the Hardware series.

Laptops • TV Tuner Cards • Wireless • Servers • Storage • Other Hardware • Motherboards • Related

Wikipedia has an article on:

PC Card

PC cards (formerly known as PCMCIA) are supported by the pcmciautils and is since kernel 2.6.13 replacing the deprecated pcmcia-cs.

This guide is about setup the newer pcmciautils. You find a guide for the deprecated pcmcia-cs here and an howto to upgrade from pcmcia-cs to pcmciautils here.

1 Basic Setup
- 1.1 Kernel Setup
- 1.2 Software Setup
2 Links

[edit] Basic Setup

[edit] Kernel Setup

Linux Kernel Configuration: PCMCIA support

Bus options (PCI, PCMCIA, EISA, MCA, ISA)  --->
    PCCARD (PCMCIA/CardBus) support  --->
        <M> PCCard (PCMCIA/CardBus) support
        <M>   16-bit PCMCIA support (NEW)
        [*]     Load CIS updates from userspace (EXPERIMENTAL) (NEW)
        [*]   32-bit CardBus support

Additionally choose a brigde. Nearly all modern computers have a yenta-compatible bridge:

Linux Kernel Configuration: PCMCIA support

Bus options (PCI, PCMCIA, EISA, MCA, ISA)  --->
    PCCARD (PCMCIA/CardBus) support  --->
        <M> PCCard (PCMCIA/CardBus) support
        ---   PC-card bridges
        <M>   CardBus yenta-compatible bridge support

[edit] Software Setup

# emerge -av pcmciautils

If you are running x86 or x86_64, you maybe need a resource database. These sockets don't need a database:

Au1x00
HD64465
M32R_PCC
M32R_CFC
MPC8xx
OMAP
PXA2xx
SA1100
SA1111
VRC4171
VRC4173

If your socket is not in the list, check lspci. Look out for your PC Card device, e.g.:

03:01.0 CardBus bridge: O2 Micro, Inc. Cardbus bridge (rev 21)

If the first two digit number of the number in front are zero (here 03), you need a resource database, else not. If, you have to edit /etc/pcmcia/config.opts to your needs (see this - no longer maintained - list).