I seem to have successfully installed slackware 10.1 on my acer laptop (Travelmate 8104WLMi).

When I boot through lilo I get the familiar screens but the system hangs at

Starting PCMCIA services:
<Probing for PCIC: edit /etc/rc.d/rc.pcmcia>

It goes no further.

Is there a boot parameter I can use to stop it probing for PCMCIA or does anyone have another suggestion?

Cheers

I seem to have figured out a partial solution. I have renamed the rc.pcmcia file to rc.pcmcia.bak and I can now get to a command prompt. Getting there!

If you don't use pcmcia cards, then making rc.pcmcia non-executable will do the work (and it's the right way to do it). Just use: chmod -x /etc/rc.d/rc.pcmcia

I agree making it non-executable is the correct method to use. If you use pcmcia cards, the next step will be to find out why it's hanging.

Thanks for the answers and it has solved the issue of getting the thing to boot. I now have a working environment.

I notice now that none of my usb ports work. Could that be as a result of disabling pcmcia?

Any clues on how I can start to figure out why it hangs?

Cheers

That can be caused by disabling hotplug, but not by disabling pcmcia. the two port types are very different.

Also, it's possible your kernel doesn't have USB support. Hotplug would be my first guess, though, because a lot of people disable it to speed up booting.

killerbob,

I've enabled hotplug at boot and the system hangs at:

Activating hardware detection : etc/rc.d/rc.hotplug start

It would seem that I need to stopt the system doing this at startup. Do you know if I can enable it when I am up and running just for those times I need usb?

Thanks again

OK

I've disabled the startup script again and I can boot into the system.

If I manually run /etc/rc.d/rc.hotplug start, the system hangs and I am unable to do anything with it, its locked solid.

Any other way to get access to usb?

You need something like hotplug to handle USB. I think a kernel recompile may be in order, though... usually it'll only freeze on hotplug or pcmcia if it tries to load the wrong module for something connected.

I find that the default USB configuration in 2.6 has worked for me on almost all of my computers. No need to change any of the settings. YMMV, but you could try that. Other than that, you will need to go to /etc/hotplug and look at all of the scripts in there (the .rc files) to see which ones you need and can disable. Just make 'em non-executable to disable them in the hotplug subsystem. A recompile of the kernel to remove any modules that you don't actually use may be a better route, though. Whenever I do an install, that's the first thing I do, because the system is faster without support for hardware that isn't there.

sorry I can't be of much more use than that. :/

OK thanks killerbob

I'll try a re-install. I can't help thinking it something about the hardware in the laptop and the way its setup. I've never had these problems on several machines I've installed to, but this is my first laptop.

Last gasp attempt - I tried another distro and found that FC3 installs and recognises usb devices although the display is low res.

So it means that there is linux compatability, just that slack for some reason is not getting it.

Does anyone know how I can figure out what FC3 is doing that Slack isn't?

No disrespect to fedora, just preference for Slack!

I had the same problem with fedora core 1 , since FC1 comes with 2.4.22 I guess there is sth wrong with kernel configuration or maybe this kernel lacks sth.
the symptoms where the same of yours
FC1 freezed while trying to probe my USB or Firewire ports and I had to pass nousb and nofirewire parameters to deal with it
then it comes slackware 10.1 which also hanged during installation (but this time only on firewire) and again , well it was 2.4 kernel ,so it reminded me of the solution on FC1 and it worked!
after all when I installed it with bare-i noieee1394 kernel boot params there were no futhur problems!