Dell Laptop Lore

by Bill Cattey

Last Modified: $Date: 2002/09/25 01:58:52 $

For the Dell systems, the current procedure is complicated by the fact that the wireless card is a PCMCIA device, and stock Red Hat insists on initializing the network BEFORE the PCMCIA devices. So this is a wizard-level thing to set up:

1. Become the super user.
2. cd /etc/rc5.d
3. ls S*pcmcia S*network
4. Notice the number between the S and the rest of the filename.
5. Rename the pcmcia entry to have a number one less than the number for the network entry. (Note that you must have leading zeros for single digit numbers.) Example:

   mv S20pcmcia S09pcmcia
   

Once that is done, the PCMCIA card will get initialized in time to be useful for the network.

• To change from wired to wireless operation:
  1. Modify /etc/modules.conf to comment out the 3c59x wired network adapter and add the wavelan-cs wireless adapter:

  # alias eth0 3c59x
  alias eth0 wavelan-cs
  

  2. Reboot
• To change from wireless back to wired, comment out the wavelan-cs adapter, un-comment the 3c59x adapter, and reboot.

One further complication: The Linux installer works too hard to find unusual network interfaces and use them, and then the normal Linux start-up does not work hard enough. This has ended up resulting in the Dell laptops using the wireless card to install (and taking a LONG time to do the install) and then requiring the hard-wired line to run normally. It is for this reason that the recommendation is to disable the wireless card in the BIOS on the Dell laptops.