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Getting my PCMCIA Serial card to work

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  Getting my PCMCIA Serial card to work Anders Andersson <pipatron@gmail.com> - 2024-03-02 11:20 +0100
    Re: Getting my PCMCIA Serial card to work Anssi Saari <anssi.saari@debian-user.mail.kapsi.fi> - 2024-03-02 12:10 +0100
    Re: Getting my PCMCIA Serial card to work Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org> - 2024-03-02 13:20 +0100

#267988 — Getting my PCMCIA Serial card to work

I like old PCMCIA cards, and would like to get a serial card to work
on a Thinkpad X40 running Debian 12.5.

The card is just called "Serial I/O PC Card" and should be physically
and electrically compatible, 3.3V/5V, 16 bit. I think it is this:
https://shop.ocr.ca/media/pdf/Socket-Mobile/srliopc.pdf

It didn't immediately work when I inserted it, and instead of spending
hours following the red herring down the rabbit hole I thought I
should try asking here first for a change. This is what I get from
dmesg:

[  331.059401] pcmcia_socket pcmcia_socket0: pccard: PCMCIA card
inserted into slot 0
[  331.059429] pcmcia_socket pcmcia_socket0: cs: memory probe
0xd8200000-0xdf9fffff:
[  331.060446]  excluding 0xd8980000-0xd90fffff 0xdaf00000-0xdb67ffff
0xdbe00000-0xdc57ffff 0xdcd00000-0xdd47ffff 0xddc00000-0xde37ffff
0xdeb00000-0xdf27ffff
[  331.068677] pcmcia (null): pcmcia: registering new device
pcmcia(null) (IRQ: 3)
[  331.141504] orinoco 0.15 (David Gibson
<hermes@gibson.dropbear.id.au>, Pavel Roskin <proski@gnu.org>, et al)
[  331.197037] spectrum_cs 0.0: Failed to initialize firmware (err = -16)
[  331.197062] spectrum_cs: orinoco_init() failed

When I searched for "spectrum_cs" and "orinico" I got a lot of results
for some PC Card WLAN interface, which isn't right. Does anyone
recognize this? It should have a bog-standard 16550 compatible UART
and PCMCIA is more or less an ISA bus so I did not foresee any
problem. Is it perhaps incorrectly detecting my card as a WLAN card?

// Anders

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#267989

Anders Andersson <pipatron@gmail.com> writes:

> When I searched for "spectrum_cs" and "orinico" I got a lot of results
> for some PC Card WLAN interface, which isn't right. Does anyone
> recognize this? It should have a bog-standard 16550 compatible UART
> and PCMCIA is more or less an ISA bus so I did not foresee any
> problem. Is it perhaps incorrectly detecting my card as a WLAN card?

It's probably been about 20 years since I've used a PCMCIA card in
Linux.

Anyways, do you have the pcmciautils package installed? That provides
some useful tools to figure things out. udev rules too, presumably to
autoload drivers. That card should probably work with the serial_cs
driver.

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#267991

Anders Andersson wrote: 
> I like old PCMCIA cards, and would like to get a serial card to work
> on a Thinkpad X40 running Debian 12.5.
> 
> The card is just called "Serial I/O PC Card" and should be physically
> and electrically compatible, 3.3V/5V, 16 bit. I think it is this:
> https://shop.ocr.ca/media/pdf/Socket-Mobile/srliopc.pdf
> 
> It didn't immediately work when I inserted it, and instead of spending
> hours following the red herring down the rabbit hole I thought I
> should try asking here first for a change. This is what I get from
> dmesg:
> 
> [  331.059401] pcmcia_socket pcmcia_socket0: pccard: PCMCIA card
> inserted into slot 0
> [  331.059429] pcmcia_socket pcmcia_socket0: cs: memory probe
> 0xd8200000-0xdf9fffff:
> [  331.060446]  excluding 0xd8980000-0xd90fffff 0xdaf00000-0xdb67ffff
> 0xdbe00000-0xdc57ffff 0xdcd00000-0xdd47ffff 0xddc00000-0xde37ffff
> 0xdeb00000-0xdf27ffff
> [  331.068677] pcmcia (null): pcmcia: registering new device
> pcmcia(null) (IRQ: 3)
> [  331.141504] orinoco 0.15 (David Gibson
> <hermes@gibson.dropbear.id.au>, Pavel Roskin <proski@gnu.org>, et al)
> [  331.197037] spectrum_cs 0.0: Failed to initialize firmware (err = -16)
> [  331.197062] spectrum_cs: orinoco_init() failed
> 
> When I searched for "spectrum_cs" and "orinico" I got a lot of results
> for some PC Card WLAN interface, which isn't right. Does anyone
> recognize this? It should have a bog-standard 16550 compatible UART
> and PCMCIA is more or less an ISA bus so I did not foresee any
> problem. Is it perhaps incorrectly detecting my card as a WLAN card?

It is definitely recognizing your card incorrectly; I have a
couple of those orinocos about. (Lucent 802.11b wifi, the first
mass-market chipset for wifi. $150 each when they first came
out.)

This might be a useful doc for you -- in particular, section
4.4 on serial and modem devices:

https://tldp.org/HOWTO/PCMCIA-HOWTO-4.html

-dsr-

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