[lug] PCMCIA Troubleshooting

[Elyse Grasso]

Can someone point me at the best information for troubleshooting PCMCIA in 
laptops? I'm using KRUD (RedHat) 7.2 with the latest kernel, upgraded from 
various earlier versions of KRUD and RedHat.

Minor mystery: during boot, a message from cardmgr appears on the screen 
complaining about line 8 of the ./config.opts file, but that message does not 
show up in the boot.log file or the messages file. Where else could it be 
going? (This message also appears on machines that were initally installed 
clean from the October KRUD distribution. Did the file format change with the 
2.4 kernels and the opts file not get redone? Where could I find out about 
this?) 

Big problem: I have a bunch of Inspiron 2500 laptops at work on which cards 
that work on my personal laptop (an Inspiron 4000 that came with Linux 
configured and installed by Dell)  are not configured. I think that PCMCIA is 
having trouble identifying system resources that are safe to use. Is there 
detailed documentation on how to do this (for 2.4.x based distributions) 
available somewhere? I haven't found it by googling but may not be using the 
right searches. There seems to be a nasty interaction with apmd involved 
somehow, too. I think I'm going to be finding out way more about the guts of 
both Linux the machines and Linux than I really hoped I'd need to know.

Thanks for any pointers

Elyse Grasso