This purpose of this Bug Report is to notify people of a major bug that affectes some PCMCIA Ethernet cards under Arch 0.7. It appears to be fixed in 0.7.1. (But since some PCMCIA Ethernet cards will not work, it may be hard to go from a 0.7 install to 0.7.1 via pacman. You need a working internet connection!)

I originally tried to install arch linux 0.7 from the arch 0.7 Installation CD. The installation went smoothly. But it failed to properly setup my D-LINK DFE-690 TXD PCMCIA Ethernet Card. I tried everything including disabling the PCMCIA and Hotplug daemons during bootup and loading the needed modules manually after bootup using modprobe.

In my case, my PCMCIA Ethernet card should work fine once the following 4 modules are loaded -- pcmcia.core, yenta_socket, mii and 8139too. I could load them and lsmod showed them all. But whenever I tried to get eth0 up and running using dhcpcd (or ifconfig eth0 up), I would receive an error - "SIOCSIFFLAGS: Device or Resource Busy."

I tried to get networking running using the minimal linux environment created by the arch 0.7 Installation CD. After manually loading the 4 modules using modprobe and then running dhcpcd, my PCMCIA ethernet card was up and running. Great!!

This is very strange. I can get my ethernet PCMCIA card working during installation with the 0.7 arch Installation CD. But after arch 0.7 was installed, it was impossible to get my PCMCIA Ethernet card up and running.

The problem is clearly with the 2.6.10 kernels included on the arch 0.7 cd. (It does not make any difference if you use the IDE or SCSI kernels. Some PCMCI Ethernet cards will not work with the kernels that are installed!!). The kernel that boots off the installation CD is different and works fine.

There is a solution. Forget the CD install. Use the FTP install which will install 0.7.1 with the 2.6.13 kernel. PCMCIA Ethernet cards appear to work fine with the newer kernels in arch 0.7.1.

To get the FTP install going, manually load the networking and PCMCIA modules using modprobe. Then run dhcpcd. Then proceed with the FTP installation.

I wish someone could pin point the problem with the 2.6.10 kernels that come with arch 0.7 so that the problem does not appear again.

Rob