Configuring PCMCIA cards

BeOS 5’s PC Card support is somewhat different than it was in R4.5. These instructions assume you have BeOS 5 installed.
Insert your card, open a Terminal window, and type:

cardctl ident

Copy the „product info“ line or „manfid“ line to the clipboard. Type these lines:

cd ~/config/settings/kernel/drivers
cp pcmcia.default pcmcia
StyledEdit pcmcia

Add your card’s indentification, referring to existing ones, and paste the product info or manfid into the second line. Make sure to start the line with either „version“ or „manfid“ depending on which information you copied earlier.
Save the file, then remove and re-insert your card. Launch Network preferences. If your card is a network card, it should now show up as an available NIC. If it’s a modem card, it should show up under Modem settings as an additional serial port.
Note that BeOS 5 currently only supports NE2000 compatible network cards in addition to the ones that have explicit support. Even if your card shows up under Network preferences, there is no guarantee that it will work properly — you may still need a driver for it.
You should now be able to use the card whenever it’s inserted. The only minor annoyance with the PCMCIA implementation is that BeOS informs you (in the form of a dialog box) when it enables PCMCIA cards. You must press OK each time when booting up. To disable these messages, see the tip: Stop those annoying PCMCIA messages.
I have compiled an additional card database taken from Linux and FreeBSD, covering many ethernet pcmcia cards. Other notebook-related tools are available at that page as well.
If you don’t want to run cardctl or edit the card database, get the “ PC Card Wizard „, extract it, and run pccard-wizard.sh. The wizard will lead you through the process. Note that the wizard only works in R4.5.x (as of this writing), not R5.
For Be’s official how-to, see the PCMCIA section at Breaking News.
[Editor’s note: All of this will get much easier in a future BeOS release.]

See also:
Configuring an 802.11b wireless network card
 

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