[tlug] Docomo N2502 card on Linux

[michael eng <cca@example.com>]

Greetings TLUG!

I hope someone can help me here...  I have a NEC/NTT Docomo N2502 data 
card I would like to use under Ubuntu Linux.  The card is a 16-bit 
Compact Flash card which presents itself to the computer as a USB 
interface, behind which two USB serial devices sit - one is the wireless 
modem and the other is some kind of control interface.

As far as I can see, most such devices overseas are 32-bit CardBus cards 
which easily attach to the Linux PCI subsystem without any special 
persuasion, and so they are controlled by the normal usb-ohci driver.  
Since this is a 16-bit CF/PCMCIA card, I guess have to find a PCMCIA 
specific driver which can be the USB host controller, then I can get the 
modem using the USB subsystem.

The nearest such driver I could find in the mainline kernel was 
"sl811_cs", when I tried to force this onto the card by sysfs  
(following the instructions in linux/Documentation/pcmcia/driver.txt) , 
I got a Kernel oops - well, it was a long shot.

I found an announcement at 
http://www.turbolinux.co.jp/security/2009/TLSA-2009-28j.txt which says 
that Turbolinux supports the card, but when I look inside the SRPM, I 
only see patches for the USB part of the N2502 and no clues on the 
PCMCIA part.  I noticed that the Turbolinux kernel is using the old 
pcmcia-cs driver for PCMCIA, which may be related.

Could anyone suggest what to try next?

thank you,
Michael

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