Most laptops come with PCMCIA (also called PC Card)
slots; these are supported fine under FreeBSD. Look through
your boot-up messages (using dmesg(8)) and see whether these were
detected correctly (they should appear as
pccard0
,
pccard1
etc on devices like
pcic0
).
FreeBSD 4.X supports 16-bit PCMCIA cards, and
FreeBSD 5.X supports both 16-bit and
32-bit (“CardBus”) cards. A database of supported
cards is in the file /etc/defaults/pccard.conf
.
Look through it, and preferably buy cards listed there. Cards not
listed may also work as “generic” devices: in
particular most modems (16-bit) should work fine, provided they
are not winmodems (these do exist even as PC Cards, so watch out).
If your card is recognised as a generic modem, note that the
default pccard.conf
file specifies a delay time of 10 seconds
(to avoid freezes on certain modems); this may well be
over-cautious for your modem, so you may want to play with it,
reducing it or removing it totally.
Some parts of pccard.conf
may need
editing. Check the irq line, and be sure to remove any number
already being used: in particular, if you have an on board sound
card, remove irq 5 (otherwise you may experience hangs when you
insert a card). Check also the available memory slots; if your
card is not being detected, try changing it to one of the other
allowed values (listed in the manual page pccardc(8)).
If it is not running already, start the pccardd(8) daemon. (To enable it at boot time, add
to
/etc/rc.conf
.) Now your cards should be
detected when you insert and remove them, and you should get
log messages about new devices being enabled.
There have been major changes to the pccard code (including ISA routing of interrupts, for machines where FreeBSD is not able to use the PCI BIOS) before the FreeBSD 4.4 release. If you have problems, try upgrading your system.
This, and other documents, can be downloaded from http://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/
For questions about FreeBSD, read the
documentation before
contacting <questions@FreeBSD.org>.
For questions about this documentation, e-mail <doc@FreeBSD.org>.