Novell LINUX ENTERPRISE DESKTOP 10 SP2 - DEPLOYMENT GUIDE 08-05-2008 Deployment Manual page 531

PCMCIA
PCMCIA is often used to refer the hardware itself, although the term originates from
the organization that standardized all possible types of PC cards, the PC Memory Card
International Association. In the beginning, PCMCIA only included PC cards (using
a 16-bit bus like ISA cards), but later on CardBus cards (using a 32-bit bus) were in-
cluded. A wide range of PCMCIA hardware is supported in Linux. Linux additionally
includes tools for managing PCMCIA.
PCMCIA cards are mainly used in mobile computing for different purposes. Examples
include:
• Ethernet and wireless LAN adapters
• Bluetooth cards
• Memory cards (Flash, SRAM, and others)
• Memory card adapters (SD, MMC, SmartMedia, CompactFlash, MemoryStick)
• Modems
Most of the card management is silently handled by udev and hotplug. When user inter-
action is required, you use the pccardctl command. For PCMCIA background in-
formation, refer to Section 26.2, "PCMCIA in Detail"
pccardctl, refer to
(page 516).
Section 26.1, "Controlling PCMCIA Cards Using pccardctl"
(page 516). For details on
26
PCMCIA 515