Many thanks to everyone who answered so quickly - your reference to the
GENERIC kernel is what prompted me to find out what was causing the
problem.  Basically I was using the old trackpoint kernel
(http://www.netbsd.org/%7Egreg/hpcmips/) which seems to not fully
support my the xircom card.  I swapped to using the GENERIC kernel and
it finds it perfectly (as xi0) - just for info it also supports the
Toshiba wirless lan pc card pa3064u-1pcc gold

Another interesting aspect of this kernel change is that gregs
trackpoint kernel did not allow the z50 to fully reboot - and I had to
hard reboot each time (ie physically take the batteries out etc etc) so
this is a very convenient bonus for me!!!

Many thanks guys

steve
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Steve Dobson                                  Tel:   +44 01904 433953
Experimental Officer                          Fax:   +44 01904 433902
Department of Archaeology                     Email: sd20@york.ac.uk
The King's Manor
University of York
York, YO1 7EP, UK
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-----Original Message-----
From: port-hpcmips-owner@NetBSD.org
[mailto:port-hpcmips-owner@NetBSD.org] On Behalf Of Miles Nordin
Sent: 05 August 2004 19:08
To: port-hpcmips@NetBSD.org
Subject: Re: device setup


>>>>> "sd" == S Dobson <sd20@york.ac.uk> writes:

    sd> in the /dev directory there are no network devices

There shouldn't be, but you should see the interface listed in 'ifconfig
-a'.  If you don't, the card's driver isn't working right. This could be
because the card isn't supported, because there's a bug in the driver,
or because the driver isn't compiled into your kernel.

Often the GENERIC config files for non-i386 are out-of-sync accidentally
or on purpose, and they don't include all the drivers, so if your card
indeed doesn't show up in 'ifconfig -a' you should cross your fingers
and hope that's the case.  Then post your boot output and tell us what
kernel you're using.

    sd> Netbsd detects it but doesn't give it a device name (such as
    sd> xi0 or eth0).

you should post the boot messages.  you can get them back with something
like

$ dmesg | less

To get them into an email, maybe you can copy them onto a CF disk and
then stick the disk into another laptop with network?

-- 
Le fascisme est la dictature ouverte de la bourgeoisie.
		-- Georg Dimitrov