How to go online with an expresscard under linux?

[petercn]

Hi Gurus,

I just bought service from Chinaunicom, to go online with my Dell 640m laptop, I have a Expresscard slot, so I bought a Expresscard, and I get the small sim card from my ISP, after open up an account and paid the fees, and then they installed the hardware drive(expresscard drive), and i can go online under XP, good, though not very fast.


I am using dual OS systems, so now I wonder how can I go online under my Fedora, first I cannot go online now under Fedora, so if you suggest my search the driver or some software stuff and install there is not possible.

I need to find the iformation, like drivers, and then I will download under windows,and then install under linux.

Any news about that, how to fix it?

most of the hardwares are only having drivers under windows,

I tried the linux with my card on, it cannot detect it.

Peter

[petercn]

it is really easy under windows, any good way on linux?

Peter

[marko]

Here's a compatibility list, might not be complete though

http://tuxmobil.org/expresscard_linux.html

The driver module you'd use is already in Linux as pciehp,
this is what I see on my Fedora 9 64 bit installation

$>modinfo pciehp
filename: /lib/modules/2.6.25.4-30.fc9.x86_64/kernel/drivers/pci/hotplug/pciehp.ko
license: GPL
description: PCI Express Hot Plug Controller Driver
author: Dan Zink <dan.zink@compaq.com>, Greg Kroah-Hartman <greg@kroah.com>, Dely Sy <dely.l.sy@intel.com>
srcversion: 13FD7EA0968034E9E94669F
depends:
vermagic: 2.6.25.4-30.fc9.x86_64 SMP mod_unload
parm: pciehp_debug:Debugging mode enabled or not (bool)
parm: pciehp_poll_mode:Using polling mechanism for hot-plug events or not (bool)
parm: pciehp_poll_time:Polling mechanism frequency, in seconds (int)
parm: pciehp_force:Force pciehp, even if _OSC and OSHP are missing (bool)


Here's an example of someone claiming the expresscard is
supported on a Dell 640m

http://www.linlap.com/wiki/Dell+Inspiron+640m

which is good news.

The big question is I have no idea how that ISP handles the connection,
did that ISP give you some applet you run to make the internet
connection? If it's some unique app, then it can go from nearly impossible
(binary blob doing totally unknown procedure unique to ISP) to easy
(doing standard OS connection steps like a script so the ISP code
is pretty much doing the same thing linux would do)

If it's a basic DSL connection, then this type of setup
should do:
http://www.reallylinux.com/docs/dslandlinux.shtml

where you'd tell the system to use pciehp as the ethernet device