pcmcia 16bit ethernet troubles

[Eberhard Roloff]

Hi,

For several years now, I have been using an old IBM Thinkpad
T21, 700Mhz, 320MB, 10GB with 16bit Network Cards. One Xircom
"RealPort Etehrnet 10/100+Modem 56" Modem/Network Card and a
3Com Fast EtherLink 16-Bit PC Card. 

From Suse to Breezy, they worked great through the years and
always were autodetected during installation. With Dapper (now
Xubuntu 6.6.1, updated via CDRom, since the network does not
operate), nothing works. The Cards are detected, ethernet LED
goes to on during boot, anything looks promising and....
nothing more. I even can configure manually an ipadress with
ipconfig, but the boards do not work, i.e. not a single packet
is going out.

When I eject and reinsert a card, voar/log/messages says this
(in the case of the 3com), pls. note: This is transcribed, since
I do not have a network connection ;-(

-pccard: card ejected from slot 1
-pccard: PCMCIA card inserted into slot 1
-pcmcia: registering new device pcmcia1.0
-ASIC rev 1,<eth0>: 3C574-TX Fast Etherlink PC CArd at io 0x300,
irq 3,hw_addr 00:10:4B:EF:6A:90. (btw: this is correct!)
-64k FIFO split 1:1 Rx:Tx, autoselect MII interface.
-eth0: found link beat.
-eth0: autonegotiation complete: 100base-FD selected.
-eth0: remote fault detected
-exiting on signal 15

while this looks promising, I cannot agree to the remote fault
detection. ;-)), After all, the same PC works ok on the same
network cable on the same port of the switch at the same speed,
when booted with Knoppix.

I installed the -normally now- depreciated "card-services"
package from the ubuntu reepos, but did not succed with this, as
well.

To be on the safe side, I tested with Knoppix 5.01 Boot CD
(Kernel 2.6.17) and the cards work immediately and
automagically. The very same with damnssmalllinux (on Kernel
2.4.something).

I googled myself nearly to death ;-) but only found general
remarks that the pcmcia subsystem significantly changed with
kernel 2.6.13 (I believe) and some related info on kernel.org.
A search on the ubuntu forums with "pcmcia" did not find
anything releveant for my case as far as I could tell, either.

My question: Is there anyone out there, successfully using old,
thin, 16bit pcmcia ethernet cards with Dapper?

If so, any advice how to make it work, is
greatly appreciated.

Kind regards
Eberhard