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> This was the serendipitous result of my Gateway Solo 2000 having cardbus
> and PCMCIA problems.  It had worked with non-cardbus pcmcia cards
> including airo wireless, in BL, DSL and Puppy, and not with cardbus cards.
> Then suddenly stopped working with any PCMCIA cards (cardctl ident found
> nothing) with BL and DSL, with the warning in BL:  No high memory space
> available.  Unable to map card memory.  Puppy still works with PCMCIA.

BL booted with lilo works with pcmcia (not cardbus)

BL booted with loadlin would not work with pcmcia and complained about no 
high memory.  The reason - himem.sys in config.sys was specified as 
c:\windows\command\himem.sys and was no longer being loaded in DOS (Win98 
died and I deleted it c:\windows etc.).  Adding himem.exe and editing 
config.sys fixed the problem.

Puppy booted with loadlin (and its own intrd.gz) works with pcmcia even 
without DOS himem.sys.  No idea why.  Something in initrd?

DSL boots from CD (isolinux).  I will check again whether pcmcia works.


In ten years I never knew that you need himem enabled in DOS if you boot 
BL from loadlin, in order for pcmcia to work. (Maybe just on this 
laptop?).  Why is this so?

Along the way the laptop stopped booting but my partner twisted the case 
and it went on again.  It is now getting confused by the infrared port 
when I try to use ttyS1 so I had to put in two pcmcia modems and use the 
second which is ttyS3, after getting LSR Safety Check Engaged error - 
meaning it looked at ttys1 (found by cardmgr) and found infrared not 
modem.  I am amazed anything ever works at all.

Puppy linux can find a wireless network to connect to while sitting next 
to my router (70/70 signal strength), but when I try to connect to the 
neighbor's signal which it finds with a wirireless scan, (58/70) it 
refuses.  BL connects and goes online. Both routers are Netgear with the 
same IP number.  I cannot figure out how Puppy works in order to see if 
they set it to work only with strong signals.  Hopefully I will find SOME 
laptop that works with both BL and cardbus and boots reliably to use with 
the cardbus cards, which have better signal strength.

Reminds me of VCRs - the older models pick up lots of weak signals and the 
newer ones almost nothing.  When the newer linuxes are good they are very 
very good....

When the hardware is bad or the signal is weak,  BL to the rescue.

A Belkin USB wireless card used 98% of a 200MHz cpu.  (Belkin also 
produced Windows software for its cardbus modem that uses more than 100% 
of 96MB RAM and completely disabled a laptop).  Aero is the best.

Sindi