I've had problems getting ANY PCMCIA card recognized on Mandrake 9.2 on a laptop

Cards -- Various Wireless cards
-- IBM Microdrive / Compact Flash card (with pcmcia adapter -- quicker than using direct camera usb connections)
-- USB2 Card adapter

All these work fine in 'DOZE XP so I know the pcmcia slot is not broken.

Microdrive and USB2 adapter cards work fine on SUSE 9 (download version) -- I know there is a problem with wireless networking but I'll leave that for the moment as the internal ethernet card works fine.

Mandrake starts PCMCIA service -- but I don't hear any beeps. No card info is available either -- looks like card services or something is missing.

I've seen some people saying Mandrake 10 beta seems to fix this (including some wireless networking)

Anybody tried it yet --

Anybody also got a Bittorrent address where I can download -- I've got a nice fast connection so can leave it running for a while -- google not much help yet on this.

Thanks