howto cleanly (r)eject pcmcia-card (wifi)

[arri]

hi,

i'm using a belkin 802.11g card with my titanium (slimpie),
and it all works great, except for one thing:
taking-out the card, and putting it back in without a reboot.

since the card sticks-out, i can't leave it in when i put slimpie in my bag and step on my bike to race through amsterdam..

i tried about everything i could imagine, and there's one way that sort of works, but that often results in problems..
i have to take the card out after i put slimpie to sleep, and put it back in before i wake it up again.

but ofcourse i often forget the last step. in such a case i have to reboot before i can get the card to work again.

i also tried turning off airport, unload the airport2 kext, power-off the card, then eject it. that part works, but then i never managed to get it up and running again..

on linux i have no problems doing such a thing, but how would i cleanly do this on OSX?


thanks!

 

[arri]

after another session of fiddling i managed to successfully power-off and eject the card, re-insert it and get it up running again, without having to restart slimpie...

i can't believe i'm so stupid, and couldn't get this working before! it's so actually very simple... here's how!

asuming you have a working airport-connection, in order to take-out the card:

1) you first switch-OFF the airport-interface. you can do this in the airport-menu in the menubar ('Turn Airport off'). i have configured locations to do this.
The airport-menu in the menubar now says 'Airport: Not configured'

2) you select 'Power off card' in the pcmcia-menu-icon that appeared in the menubar when you inserted the card. The airport menu now says 'No Airport card installed'

3) you can now eject the card, sleep the computer and safely step on your bike with the laptop in your bag..

i've found that you can skip step 2, but somehow i guess it's better to do it anyway...


4) to get the card back 'up' again, you just insert the card after waking the machine, and switch-ON airport again in the menu.
you'll notice the airport menu will say 'No Airport card installed' before and 'Airport: Not configured' after you inserted the card.

there's a lot of other possible permutations in the order of steps to take, or steps to leave-out. also i experimented with booting the machine without the card and then inserting the card after booting. this works great, only the airport-menu will be gone. you reenable it in system-prefs.

apart from that i gave-up experimenting, since i found the answer to my question. goodluck.