> trying to set up an old dell latitude CP pentium laptop.

> the dmesg doesn't seem to show the :
> "dell fast ethernet 10/100 base-tx by 3Com"
> pcmcia card as detected.

> My dmesg should say "Ethernet" somewhere shouldn't it?

Not necessarily.  It could be just numbers, akin to the way PCI devices
not handled by drivers show up as stuff like "vendor 0x1234 product
0x5678 at pci2 dev 9 function 7 not configured".

Since PCMCIA is hot-plug, I'd suggest booting without the card and
plugging it in after boot.  That way the messages related to that card
will be easily identifiable - they're the ones that appear when you
plug the card in.

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