I'm having a big problem on my laptop.

I have a compaq presario 2110 (got it just before XMas) and while Mandrake 9.2 worked ok after a lot of tinkering (its problematic hardware).

However, to get ACPI working the way it should I needed to upgrade to 2.6. So I did.

Boy has it been painful.

I've gotten most of the obvious problems worked out (modules wouldn't work because they were in the wrong folder ...stuff like that)

but since then (because it was FINE before with 2.4) PCMCIA seems to have a major problem...it seems to start fine but it doesn't detect any card in it so I can't access my network (wifi).

It no longer works even booting with 2.4...so I can't even back out. This is a major problem for me. I'm stuck using XP til I fix it...*shudder*

One error I found...when issuing a /etc/pcmcia restart

cardmgr[2420]: no sockets found!

edit:

found something else...I can't use yenta_socket for this laptop (freezes the machine...found the info while setting up wifi originally) so I need to use i82365 (added a line in /sysconfig/pcmcia a while back). So I checked this out:

[root@localhost tcaptain]# modprobe i82365
FATAL: Error inserting i82365 (/lib/modules/2.6.0-1mdkcustom/kernel/drivers/pcmcia/i82365.ko): No such device

I checked the path, i82365 is there...it compiled...I checked my kernel options and it was in there to compile.

end edit.

I've searched and I haven't found anything yet...recompiled 4-5 times today and no luck. Can anyone give me a clue?

More edit:

I got to the point where pcmcia was the only problem (but quite a major one)

I found some postings in the kernel archive that for my hardware, the functionality of i82365 had been transfered to yenta_sockets....trying that out made the machine lock hard...

Further research suggested that recompiling the kernel (again) without any i82365 support would fix the problem.

I recompiled but now my kernel won't load at all....*SIGH*

8 or 9 kernel recompiles later...trying different options, I can now load..but it won't mount vfat drives and won't detect my synaptics pad...which mean X no longer works. I was soooo close now it seems like I'm 10 steps behind...

Not having vfat access means I can't transfer anything I download (like notes or html pages with possible solutions) from my Windows partitions to linux)

Desperation is setting in...WinXP is hell to use...

End edit.