pcmcia network device not working in fedora core 2

symptom: In Fedora Core 2, a pcmcia networking card doesn’t work on boot. This is with kernels 2.6.6 and greater. Oddly, 2.6.5-385 (which came with the distro) works fine. After boot, it is impossible to get the card to start up, and shutting down causes a hang. iwconfig seems to hang. Sometimes completely restarting pcmcia and reloading the yenta_socket module solves the problem.

solution: pcmcia is being loaded after networking, which is dumb. this blog entry gives a good solution:

  1. Open /etc/init.d/pcmcia
  2. Change the line
    # chkconfig: 2345 24 96
    to
    # chkconfig: 2345 09 96
    Yes, it’s in a comment, but it seems it has meaning to the chkconfig command (see below).
  3. Execute
    chkconfig –level 2345 pcmcia reset
    as root

This is all you need to do.