I received many questions about this frustrating adapter so I hereby report higgledy-piggledy the informations I gathered trying to answer those.
First, here is a layered schema trying to illustrate the collaboration between hardware and software elements at stake :
Linux is very good at dealing with PCMCIA peripherals. I can insert/remove a card and everything still works fine. This hot plug capability is provided by the PCMCIA_CS package [http://sourceforge.net/projects/pcmcia-cs], which is included in almost every distribution. Different kernel versions require different PCMCIA_CS package and modules compilations.
This is quite easy. I first download and uncompress the components. When
kernel compilation is over, I jump into the PCMCIA source tree and type
make config; make all; make install in it. That's all. A reboot is required.
Important note : in the linux kernel compilation configuration, I select Token Ring support, with NO Token Ring driver at that time. The Token Ring driver is included in the PCMCIA package.
Sometimes, I heard some lines in the /etc/pcmcia/config.opts file have to be added. I remember a long discussion about this complicated topic ...
I heared many PCMCIA_CS version problems. After many tests, here are my conclusions : PCMCIA_CS versions 3.0.0 and 3.0.14 work with a 2.0.36 kernel. Other people have reported success with few of the PCMCIA_CS 3.1.x series : 3.1.6, 3.1.14 and 3.1.18. I do not heard anything about the newer versions. That remains for you to be tried.
I hope this helps.
Good luck !
Jean-Pierre
Jean-Pierre Norguet holds a Ph.D. in Information and Communication Technology from University of Brussels and a Master's degree in Information and Communication Technology from both University of Brussels and Ecole Centrale Paris. After three years of full-time Java development with IBM on mission-critical e-business applications, as team leader and coach, his areas of expertise grew to include the entire application development lifecycle. His research interests currently focus around Java technologies, ontology integration, and Web usage mining. In addition to several Java articles online, Dr. Jean-Pierre Norguet's publications include J2EE books with Prentice Hall and IBM Press, as well as several articles in international research conferences, the proceedings of which have been edited by major scientific organizations like ACM, IEEE, and Springer-Verlag. His outside interests include artistic drawing, French theater acting, and kinesiology.