HEADS UP: OLDCARD to go away

[Dave Walton]

You wrote:
 >
 > I'm in the process of flushing my last few changes into OLDCARD
 > (mostly pccard.conf entries).  Once that's complete, I'll be removing
 > OLDCARD from head, likely early next week.

Um, exactly what does this mean?

I'm in the process of installing 5.3 on my old Thinkpad (previously 
running 4.x quite nicely).  The hitch I've run into is that 5.3 won't 
recognize either of my network cards (MA401 and EC2T), even though they 
are both on the supported hardware list and in pccard.conf.  It just 
says "Card has no functions!"  I was going to do an FTP install, so this 
had me stopped cold until a friend burned me an install CD.  So now I've 
got 5.3 running, but quite uselessly without any network.

While trying to make things work, I realized I needed to start pccardd. 
  But '/etc/rc.d/pccard start' doesn't work because /dev/card0 doesn't 
exist.  That led me to discover the OLDCARD kernel config which looks 
like it may be the key to solving my problem.

But even if that does the trick, I'm still baffled by all this.  Why 
won't 5.3 work with my cards out of the box?  If OLDCARD is the key, 
what does it mean to me that OLDCARD is going away?  If pccardd requires 
card0, which doesn't seem to exist in GENERIC, how does it work for 
people not using OLDCARD?

I've been beating my head on this for hours, and all I have to show for 
it is a mild concussion.  Can someone point me to something that 
explains all these changes clearly?  I've found nothing of any use in 
the 5.3 installation and hardware notes, the FAQ, or the Handbook.  Help?

Thanks,
Dave