[gentoo-user] Its not fair! (PCMCIA issue)

[Ian K]

HI guys,
I have resorted to putting Ubuntu on my friend's laptop.
If you remember, it was an evil Panasonic Toughbook, with
a Ricoh PCMCIA card slot(?) from hell. If you want a brief
explanation, read starting from the 1. If you want to skip
to the problem, goto 2. :)

1. Well, I tried everything, with a friend of mine on the phone,
a Gentoo user himself. We couldn't get the driver to detect
the unknown 3.3 volt Linksys WPC11 v4 card in the PCMCIA slot.
I had promised over and over to him that we could get the card
working that day, since all I thought I had to do was a modprobe.
But no such luck. I had promised him internet, and I would get
him internet. I decided to resize his Gentoo partitions and install
Windows (98SE). The resize failed, corrupting his Gentoo install.
I decided, well, he doesn't have anything on there, so I wiped it
with fdisk under the 2005.0 livecd and created an empty DOS
partition table. It said something about this hard drive having
more 'somethings' (maybe blocks, I cant remember) than the usual
amount. We had 1222. It said that Windows may not like this.
I ignored it, and tried booting with a Win98SE disc, which refused
to install on his computer. Stumped, I dug up a Ubuntu install disc,
and had him up in under an hour. I was sooooo mad!! I would have
put Gentoo back on, but the time it takes to install was more than
we had taht day.

2. So Ubuntu is up. Also note that I have posted this problem on their
list, and I have gotten one useless reply. Im asking you guys cause
there are more of you and I think your smarter. Here is the issue:

When I pop in a standard 3com 589cs card, the computer beeps, and
beeps again when I take it out. That looked promising. I then put in
his WAN card, a new Linksys Wireless B Adapter. (WPC11 version 4,
which uses a Realtek chipset.) I heard nothing when putting it in,
but heard a beep upon removing it. I checked the dmesg, and got
a Nobody cared message (IRQ 9, I believe) and a:
cs: unable to apply power.

He's on Kernel 2.6.Ithink11, 2.6.* for sure. His bridge is a Ricoh
RL5C475. There is a nice how-to for this bridge --if your on kernel 2.4.
But it was written before 2.6 came out, I think.. The address is:

http://raw-io.com/pci_802.11b.html

If you dont want to visit the site, I copied the condensed howto here:

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*Short version*:

1) compile and install 2.4.x (preferable an alan cox kernel) without
PCMCIA support but with Wireless LAN support (just Wireless LAN support,
none of the drivers under that option)
2) compile and install latest pcmcia-cs
3) compile and install latest wireless-tools

edit your pcmcia options so that your socket driver is i82365 and your
PCIC_OPTS="irq_mode=0" (use only PCI IRQs)
reboot
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Now, I dont know what to do. Ubuntu is on the 2.6 kernel.
Any ideas?
Thanks guys, I really appreciate the help.
Ian