Hi, This is an old thread (August 20 2004!), but I thought It could be useful to share the solution I've found for the "freezing" problem upon insterting, in my case, a Netgear MA401RA pcmcia card in a Sony Vaio PCG-K13 with Debian Sid & standard kernel 2.6.12.
The solution that works in my case is quite simple (but it took me a while to find it!): I just had to comment out (remove the #) the line "exlude IRQ3" at the end the /etc/pcmcia/config.opts file, and then reboot. It seems that there is an IRQ conflict if the MA401RA is set to use IRQ3. Hope it will help someone Marco > I have a problem that has been troubling me for some time. Whenever I > plugin my 802.11b PCMCIA netword card my laptop freezes completely and I > have to cut the power. The same thing happens it the PCMCIA card is in > the computer when it boots. > > Computer: > Hi-Grade notino 5400 > Netgear MA401 network card > Latest debian testing > Standard Debian kernel image 2.6.7 > In the pcmcia-howto they suggest that there might be a problem with the > ports and memory in /etc/pcmcia/config.opts. I've tried to read the > memory sections from the device driver information under windows and > inserting them in config.opts, But I keep getting the same results. > > Claus > -- Marco Laverdière