I have some Dell Latitude D630s running Fedora 10, and I'm trying to use Netgear FA511
and/or D-Link DFE-690TX PCMCIA ethernet cards
on them. However, with both cards, it is unable to read the EEPROM (it states this in
dmesg). For the Netgear FA511 cards, this
results in an interface that does not send/receive packets (not even in tcpdump on the
local machine), and the interface has the
well-known "tulip driver can't read the EEPROM" MAC address of
00:4C:69:6E:75:79 ("Linux" in Hex). For the D-Link cards, the
behavior is not quite the same, but at any rate, it doesn't appear to be able to read
the EEPROM either (all 0's MAC address, when I
was able to get the interface to come up).
The same cards work fine with the same OS (Fedora 10) on other Dell laptops (Latitude D600
and D800s, which have a different CardBus
controller). Additionally, the card works fine in the same exact machine if I install the
Fedora 11 alpha, or if I boot from an
Ubuntu live CD (running a very similarly-versioned kernel). I've tried updating the
BIOS and the OS, to no avail. It seems like this
is an issue that's already been fixed, but the fix hasn't been backported to
Fedora 10 yet.
This was submitted to bugzilla:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=488833 but I
have received no response yet. See that
site for further debug output, etc.
Thanks,
-Jeff Weston