Datasheet

“main” (Installation and Administration) — 2004/6/25 — 13:29 — page 332 — #358

If a card is inserted, card manager or hotplug determines the type and

function of the card then loads the corresponding modules. If this is suc-

cessful, card manager or hotplug starts certain initialization scripts. De-

pending on the function of the card, they establish a network connec-

tion, mount partitions from external SCSI hard drives, or carry out other

hardware-speciﬁc actions. The scripts for the card manager are located in

/etc/pcmcia/. The scripts for hotplug can be found in /etc/hotplug/.

If the card is removed, card manager or hotplug terminates all card activi-

ties using the same scripts. Finally, the modules that are no longer required

are unloaded.

Both the start process of PCMCIA and card events are recorded in the sys-

tem log (/var/log/messages). It records which PCMCIA system is cur-

rently used and which daemons have been used by which scripts to set up

things. Removing a PCMCIA device should work smoothly, at least in the-

ory. This works very well for network, modem, or ISDN cards as long as

there are no active network connections. It does, however, fail if mounted

partitions of an external hard drive or NFS directories are used. In such

cases, ensure that these units are synchronized and cleanly unmounted.

This is no longer possible if the card has already been removed. In case of

doubt, cardctl eject can help safely eject the card. This command de-

activates all cards still inserted in the laptop. To deactivate only one card,

specify the slot number, for example: cardctl eject 0.

16.1.3 Conﬁguration

Set whether PCMCIA or hotplug is started at boot time with the YaST

runlevel editor or on the command line using chkconfig. In /etc/

sysconfig/pcmcia, there are four variables:

PCMCIA_SYSTEM Speciﬁes the PCMCIA system to use.

PCMCIA_PCIC Contains the name of the module that addresses the PCM-

CIA controller. Normally, the start script should detect the module

automatically. If this automatic detection fails, enter the name of the

desired module here. Otherwise, this variable should be left empty.

PCMCIA_CORE_OPTS This was originally designed to contain parame-

ters for the pcmcia_core module, which are rarely used. Refer to

the manual page of pcmcia_core for more information about these

options.

332 16.1. PCMCIA