This is a very perplexing problem that I've been fighting for a long time. The new 2.6 kernel gave me new hope, however.

In Mandrake 9.2, none of my PCMCIA cards would work (some 16-bit pcmcia, and others cardbus). It seemed to be a socket manager problem (Texas Instruments). It seems that the yenta pci controller module was having IRQ problems.

Recently, I installed Mandrake 10 Official. The pcmcia socket itselt works great (no yenta problems!!) and my 16-bit wireless Linksys card (WPC11 v. 2) works great. I was very happy to see better hardware support in linux than ever before....

My other linksys card (I own many linksys products, probably too many, lol) is a 10/100 cardbus nic. I plug the card in, the led's on the card show that it is powered, and connected at 100 Mbps to my switch. However, when I try 'ifconfig eth0 up' it fails. 'dmesg' reports "SIOCSIFFLAGS: Device or resource busy" and also suggests "try using pci=biosirq." If I knew how to try (does it go in a config file? parameter? I'm clueless....) I'd see if that helped.

Obviously an IRQ problem. I was told that turning off the Plug & Play feature in the bios often helps with this type of problem. Unfortunately, my bios is extremely limited (worst bios I have ever seen, seriously). My Phoenix BIOS lets me change the clock and the boot device order (which, if changed, will make POST fail). That's it.

I'd love to see this card work. Besides, I really need to learn to troubleshoot hardware in linux. It may also be impossible at this point. I hope that isn't the case.

I'm using kernel 2.6.3-7 that ships with mandrake 10. The laptop is a Compaq Presario 1210us (850 MHz Duron, 320 MB ram).

Suggestions? Advice?

Thanks ...