I posted a longer description of this problem in the Laptops and Handhelds Forum, but I have had no response. Please forgive the repetition.

It appears that none of the drivers for PCMCIA card services are loading at boot-up. When I load what I think are the correct drivers with modprobe, no cards are recognized (I was able to get a card's light to go on, however). Are there any tools for troubleshooting this or for figuring out whether the drivers are correct? I did not see cardctl, lspci, or pcimodules in my version of Amigo. The file /etc/sysconfig/hwconfig indicates that the PCMCIA sockets are recognized (Toshiba ToPIC97), and specifies the driver "yenta_socket."

The main error message I get during boot-up is "can't synthesize hotplug events." It may be totally unrelated, but I also noticed that no path appears to exist until I add one manually, even though the profile has a path statement. There is also a message early in the boot process, "cannot allocate resource region 4 of device 00.05.1." FWIW, I also get an error "can't synthesize root hub events," but the USB port does work.

The computer is an old Toshiba Portege 7020CT, Windows 98. I have tried several suggestions, such as changing the card configuration in the bios. Amigo 2.0 seems otherwise to load just fine.

Any suggestions would be appreciated, or, if I should be posting this in a different forum, please let me know. I am totally new to Linux.

Have you found a line in /etc/rc.d/rc.modules for the card?
If I remember correctly the tulip driver is used for yenta cards.
Uncomment the line(remove the #) so that the kernel module will be loaded at boot time.

Thanks, Gilbert. Well, after working at this for two days, I have finally had some success. At first, no cards were being recognized at all. I read in a few places that the Portege bios could be a problem, so I experimented with setting it, alternately, at 16-bit Cardbus and PCIC Compatible. After much trial and error, I discovered that by manually modprobing the socket driver (either the i82365 for the PCIC setting or yenta for the 16 bit cardbus setting), THEN manually loading the pcnet_cs driver, I could get the light to go on in an old SMC network card. However, hotplug still wasn't working, and worse, the eth0 interface did not appear to exist. I could see from dmesg that the sockets were there, but they appeared to be empty. I even ran Kudzu, which reportedly found and configured the card, but the card was still not identified as an ethernet interface.

I tried various drivers. I figured that if I could first get the interface recognized, I could then find a way to get the right modules to load at boot-up, and maybe even to get hotplugging to work. What finally did the trick was that I tried some other cards. I put in a 3Com575 card with the 3c59x driver. The light went on, and the interface was recognized.

The hotplugging is still not working. The 3c59x driver may have loaded by itself, but it would not unload when I took the card out. Also, the yenta driver does not load at boot-up. I was able to get that to happen by putting the following line in /etc/modules.conf: "alias eth0 yenta_socket." I don't know whether that was the right way to do it.

I will look at the tulip driver, but it would really be great if each card could be recognized when it is inserted, and the driver loaded automatically. I have a wireless card that I really want to use, but I figure that will be even more difficult to set up. It certainly wasn't recognized.

Any suggestions about the right files to look at or commands to use would be appreciated. For example, I don't find lspci, which I think could be helpful.

I do like Amigo. It was the only distro I could find that would load on an old Win98 machine with no CD or floppy drive. It has also been a great introduction to Linux. Thanks.

I can report a little progress, but I hope someone has some ideas about where to go from here. I have succeeded in getting one card to work, a 3Com575, as follows:

1. The bios must be set to either 16bit/Cardbus or Auto
2. The yenta_socket driver must be loaded (that automatically loads pcmcia_core).
3. The da driver must be loaded.
Then, inserting the card will cause 3c59x to load, and eth0 comes up.

However, I can't get that to happen with my Orinoco card. I loaded orinoco_cs using modprobe, but eth0 did not come up. Strangely, kudzu saw that an Orinoco WiFi card was in the slot. After kudzu configured it, however, it still didn't show up as an interface.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.