jweston
2009-02-23, 01:17 PM CST
I have a bunch of Netgear FA511 PCMCIA ethernet cards. I'm trying to put these on a bunch of new machines, Dell Latitude D630s running Fedora 10, and I'm running into the strangest issue. The interface is detected, but it comes up with a MAC address of 00:4C:69:6E:75:79 ("Linux" in Hex). From my searching, this seems to happen commonly when the tulip driver is unable to read the EEPROM (why it is having trouble reading the EEPROM, I don't know). I can get it to change the MAC address to whatever I want by specifying MACADDR= in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1 (I have NetworkManager disabled). In either case though, I cannot get it to actually send out any packets via the PCMCIA interface. I can set up the interface and routes and try to ping, but the lights don't blink, and neither the source nor the receiver sees anything in tcpdump (just "destination host unreachable"...)
The same cards work fine with the same OS (Fedora 10) on other Dell laptops (Latitude D600 and D800s, which have a different CardBus controller). Additionally, the card works fine in the same exact machine if I boot from an Ubuntu live CD (running a very similarly-versioned kernel). I've tried updating the BIOS and the OS, to no avail.
Any help would be appreciated. I would be glad to post whatever information you need for debugging/figuring out the problem.
Actually, while I'm here ... if anyone knows how to get the window manager to stop going nuts when I try to use the joystick-style mouse instead of the touchpad on Dell laptops that have both, I'd appreciate it. It seems to get confused and click when it's not supposed to, and leave selection highlights on the desktop, and just generally not work correctly at all (but the touchpad works fine). This has been happening since Fedora 8 or 9 on numerous Dell models (D600, D800, D630).
Thanks!
The same cards work fine with the same OS (Fedora 10) on other Dell laptops (Latitude D600 and D800s, which have a different CardBus controller). Additionally, the card works fine in the same exact machine if I boot from an Ubuntu live CD (running a very similarly-versioned kernel). I've tried updating the BIOS and the OS, to no avail.
Any help would be appreciated. I would be glad to post whatever information you need for debugging/figuring out the problem.
Actually, while I'm here ... if anyone knows how to get the window manager to stop going nuts when I try to use the joystick-style mouse instead of the touchpad on Dell laptops that have both, I'd appreciate it. It seems to get confused and click when it's not supposed to, and leave selection highlights on the desktop, and just generally not work correctly at all (but the touchpad works fine). This has been happening since Fedora 8 or 9 on numerous Dell models (D600, D800, D630).
Thanks!