New linux user, tried other distros, really like the speed and easy of Vector Linux 5.1

Everything works nice, except my pcmcia ethernet card. A 3Com 3CCFEM556 B. Upon boot the light comes on, but when it looks for DHCP it tries to disable IRQ 11 for some reason, then fails. I think this is because ACPI is using IRQ 11, hard to tell, since it all goes by so fast!

Light is on, but lspci doesn't see the card. Trying to exclude irq 11 in /etc/pcmcia/config.opts doesn't seem to help. Nor does "noapic" appended to linux in lilo.conf, seem to.

In my bios I've disabled all parallel and serial ports I could, since I only use laptop keyboard and usb mouse. No printer. No external monitor. Disabled Ir as well. Changed the audiocard to an interupt freed up from my other disabled stuff and that made it work ok (i think, no errors anyway).

uname -r - 2.6.12
Compaq Armada, 7400 PII 366, 192MB
Oh and lsmod shows the correct driver for my card loaded.

All forums and similar help questions are from 2005 or so, and none with any answers, other than "upgrade kernel". A xubuntu 7.04 install got me even less than I've managed to achieve with this install though. And the speed here is something I don't want to give up on! It's like my old lenovo celeron 1.7 512MB on XP. Amazing.

Best,

edit: I just noticed that my lilo time is still default... do i need to reboot or update lilo to apply changes?

Hello,

Could this be a problem with your pcmcia hardware? Can you test it to see if any other pcmcia cards work in the same slot?

Yes, but I haven't used lilo in years. I think the command's still just 'lilo' to update.

Sam