MuLinux, Part 3

In December last year, I described on this site how I installed MuLinux on my IPC Porta-PC laptop. I installed the WKS, SRV and X11 add-ons, so I had a working graphical user interface and the necessary e-mail (mutt) and web (lynx) applications. The only thing missing was the internet connection, and I wanted to configure my PCMCIA modem for this.

Unfortunately, this was the moment that things started going wrong, I was not able to activate PCMCIA. As everybody knows, the power of Linux is that it is open source, so you can fix everything yourself.However, I am not a kernel hacker, so this option is unusable for me.

Instead I put all the error messages in an e-mail, and send it to the muLinux mailing list. Within an hour I had some responses, one of them being from Michele Andreoli, the creator of muLinux (try this with Windows!). They gave me some more options to try, but the conclusion was that in creating a tiny linux distribution, Michele had to cut out PCMCIA modem support (ethernet cards are supported however). Game over…

I do have a ‘normal’ serial modem which I could use to connect to the internet, but I want to use this modem as well for my desktop system. So the options are: using a serial modem or install another operating system which does support my PCMCIA modem.

Jeroen Sangers @jeroensangers