NetGear card not recognised.....and no PCMCIA?

Feedback Hardware
#1

Hi, gang.

I see quite a few tales of woe concerning the dreaded Broadcom B43.

Having got r1_beta_4 nicely functional on the Pavilion desktop rig, I thought I’d try it on my 2009 Dell Latitude D630; Core2Duo, 4GB RAM, Nvidia Quadro graphics. The Anyboot iso runs very nicely from the USB stick I installed it to.

Touchpad is definitely “dodgy”; way over-sensitive, and as-is I can’t do anything with it, so I’m using a mouse for now.

As with all Dells of this vintage, it’s saddled with the Broadcom B43…for its sins! Even under Puppy, this thing, although it runs, drops out every couple of minutes and constantly requires re-connecting. Since the Latitude has a PCMCIA slot, I take the same route as I took with the even older Inspiron, and use a “period” NetGear card in this slot. Uses the ‘ath5k’ driver - which the Linux kernel has supported since, like, forever…and connects very easily.

Haiku doesn’t recognise this, either the PCMCIA slot OR the NetGear card. All it sees is the Broadcom Ethernet, which I never use.

Reading here:-

…surely to God I haven’t got to buy yet another wifi dongle just for that machine?

Mike. :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

#2

There is no PCMCIA support, nor is it ever likely I’d imagine - the volume of the remaining hardware that both uses it and is fully supported by Haiku otherwise (e.g. SSE2 for Web+) isn’t huge. Not to say that someone isn’t going to do it.

#3

The device does not show up in listdev?

I am not really familiar with PCMCIA. I see we have a driver in the tree for it, but it looks pretty incomplete.

#4

'Kayyy… Fair enough. So; out of curiosity, where do I find the supported hardware list…? I DO have another NetGear, this time a USB dongle using the RealTek r8192cu chipset, but this one’s always been a bit ‘iffy’ at best. Drops out without warning, then complains about re-connecting again…

Just wondering if this one might do the job.

Mike. :thinking:

#5

You have the hw so i assume you could test it, right?

1 Like
#6

PCMCIA is a kind of PCI device so it may be recognized if already plugged in when pressing PC power on button.

#7

Original PCMCIA is modified ISA - although this card is probably actually Cardbus which is modified PCI.

Also, from very very degraded memories of trying to update the support in BeOS - which is based on the Linux Card Services project - there is a specific wake-up sequence required regardless of whether the card was installed on boot or not

#8

@extrowerk

Aye, I can certainly test it, though I can’t do so until tomorrow at the earliest. I’m not where the machine in question happens to be ATM. I will give it a try, though.

@cian

I believe you’re right. I’m fairly sure it IS “CardBus”, so…yeah.

Mike. :wink:

#9

Okay. Just tried Haiku again on the Dell Latitude. The NetGear USB dongle appears to work very well; this is a WNA 3100M, and using the rtl8192cu chipset. So far, seems much more stable than it does under Puppy…where it constantly “drops-out”.

Took a few seconds to figure out where to enter the connection details, but auto-connect works nicely after that. I’m impressed, guys!

Mike. :grinning:

1 Like
#10

I remember this being an issue several years ago because I wanted to use Haiku on some older pentium 1 / pentium 2 class machines and use cardbus / PCMCIA network adapters, as I recall the required glue code to attach the PCI/ISA bus to the cardbus controller was never written because nobody had the need/interest or access to hardware to develop it.