On 08/03/06 05:02 pm, R. G. Newbury thus wrote :

Lewis G Rosenthal wrote:

On 08/03/06 11:01 am, R. G. Newbury thus wrote :

John Poltorak wrote:

I'd like to try and get a PCMCIA card working on a DELL Inspiron 6000
laptop. Has anyone tried this?

AIUI it has a RICOH RL5c476 Cardbus controller according to a PCI scanner
I ran. Which Socket services driver will support that?

This is a Cardbus card  You do not need Socket services. An NDIS driver should do, exactly as if the card were a PCI card.

I use a Xircom Realport Cardbus card in my Thinkpad 600E and the required line is 'device=c:\ibmcom\macs\cbendis.os2'

(Together with the usual other ibmcom stuff, of course).

Geoff, AFAIK, this is indeed *not* a CardBUS card. Of course, if you're using the same chipset along with a CardBUS card, that would make my statement moot...

Are you sure that cbendis.os2 is not just a point enabler driver, which would mitigate the need for socket services?

OK i guess there are 3 choices:
If it is a 16 bit card, then you need socket services;
If it is a Cardbus card but the controller chipset does not support 32bit cardbus, then it probably will work through socket services. ISTR that cardbus can gracefully downgrade to 16bit, but that may be wrong.

CardBUS is fully backward compatible with 16-bit PCMCIA.

Finally, if the chipset supports full 32bit cardbus services then it appears as a pci bus to the system, and cardbus cards (well, nic's at least) appear as pci cards.

Yep, this is my understanding, as well.

As far as I can tell the Realport is a full cardbus services card. Socket services does not 'see' anything to do with the card itself. SS will report that the slot is in use but nothing else. That implies that it is more than just a point enabled card (althouhg it may be that
too). These cards among others will work with Veit's special programs, such as cbenable which I doubt a non-full-cardbus card would do.

Yes, this makes sense. Perhaps, then, the information at os2warp.be is in need of correction. Thanks for following up and clarifying, Geoff.