Problems installing freebsd 4.7 with pcmcia NIC

[mca1]

Hi All,

Hopefully someone can give me a bit of help. I am trying to install FreeBSD 4.7 on a sony Vaio picturebook. I have done a few installs of FreeBSD before but never any with a pcmcia NIC.

Can any one help me and explain how I configure the pcmcia NIC during install so I can continue and install FreeBSD be ftp.

The network card I am using is a Belkin F5D5020

Any help would be much appreciated

[elmore]

Hi mca1 welcome to screamingelectron.org, I'll try to give some general advise, maybe someone else will be able to go into more specifics on your particular laptop.

Most of my laptop installs are on some sort of toshiba. I have installed via ftp lots, here's what I generally have to do.

Most of my pcmcia NIC's are 3com 3c589's so first things first make sure your pcmcia card is supported. Then I have generally found that the pcmcia cards I use like to take irq 4 or 7 when booting off a FreeBSD floppy. This is not so bad except for the fact that irq four is usually a serial port and irq 7 is usually a parallel port. So what I do is just go into my computer's bios and disable them temporarily while I install FreeBSD.
Then when FreeBSD comes up to the main install window, it should ask you if you'd like to use a pcmcia media device to install, select yes. This will initialize your pcmcia card. Go through your normal install procedure and then before you commit configure your network card (I.E. IP adress subnet mask gateway DNS etc.) then select your ftp server and you should be good.

Once you have freebsd installed make sure to edit /etc/defaults/pccard.conf so you're network card can use a more appropriate irq. then go back to your bios and re-enable your serial and parallel port.

Anyways that's been my experience, perhaps someone else will shed some more light. Good Luck and thanks for coming to Screaming Electron. :D

[mca1]

Thanks Elmore, I'll give that a go. Although the laptop does not have any external parallel or serial ports it cant help to double check.

It was a breeze installing OpenBSD on the laptop but sadly support for this particular hardware was not great, no sound / apm support and a few other odds and ends so I figured I'd give free a shot after several years hiatus (last I used was FreeBSD 2.2.7 iirc )

[elmore]

FBSD has changed quite a bit since that time. Good Luck. Yeah you might not have to do everything I do, then again, we have completely different hardware. Good Luck, we'll be here to answer any questions you may have. Laterzzz.....

[mca1]

Just as expected, no lpt or com ports to disable, infact nothing to diable.
Back to the drawing board, I'll get thisyet.....

[elmore]

Is your pcmcia card on the supported list?

When you launch the install does it ask if you would like to initialize a pcmcia card?

Are your pcmcia pcic compatible?