I have been pulling my hair out for a while after updating my kernel, I couldn't get my wlan0 wireless PCMCIA card to work again. I kept re-emerging the "net-wireless/linux-wlan-ng" but was never getting the module. daevid ~ # emerge -av net-wireless/linux-wlan-ng These are the packages that I would merge, in order: Calculating dependencies ...done! [ebuild N ] net-wireless/linux-wlan-ng-0.2.1_pre23 -build -pcmcia -usb 437 kB Total size of downloads: 437 kB Then after staring at the ebuild line I realized much to my astonishment that it is set to "-pcmcia". WTF?! This seems to me absurd. 90% of the wireless cards out there are PCMCIA. So I had to edit my /etc/portage/package.use file and add 'pcmcia' to it for this ebuild. I guess I never noticed or even considered the possibility that it would default to not building PCMCIA. I would like to request that pcmcia be on by default for this ebuild. This would also go for "net-wireless/hostap-driver". "net-wireless/madwifi-driver" doesn't have this problem. It just works. Is there some logic or reason behind them being defaulted to off for these that I'm just not seeing? Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. emerge -av net-wireless/linux-wlan-ng net-wireless/hostap-driver Actual Results: notice you don't have a wlan0 module as you would expect Expected Results: had '+pcmcia' enabled by default as 90% of all wireless CARDS are PCMCIA This could be considered a feature request I suppose, but in my mind (and I'm sure the other poor suckers who had to search around and figure this out on their own too) it's a defect.
>Is there some logic or reason behind them being defaulted to off for these that I'm just not seeing? There are no defaults per ebuild. They are global (profile based). You can set the pcmcia use flag in /etc/make.conf, if you want to have it enabled for all ebuilds.
As a "specialist purveyor of guaranteed Linux-compatible wireless cards" the figure of 90% seems to me slightly excessive. I sell two types of Belkin card, both using the Ralink chipset (`emerge rt25000`) and both at the same price - over the past couple of months 40% of my orders have been for the PCMCIA (in fact Cardbus) model, 60% for the PCI model.
