I have a Pavilion n5340 laptop. The computer came with WinME, but because of my IT dept., I upgraded to Win2k. Everything went fine there. Then, for my own satisfaction, I installed Mandrake 8.0. That, too, went without a hitch.
Now the prob. Under linux, if I insert a Realtek 8139 NIC, I get one low beep. You know, the "go to hell" beep. If I do a "lspci -v" before the NIC is in, I see that the VGA and both PCMCIA controlers are on IRQ 11. I think that the rtl8139 controler is also on IRQ 11. I am pretty sure that this is causing my prob.
I downloaded a program from Realtek to do some card diag, but I cannot set the IRQ using this prog. In Windows, atempting to change an IRQ gives an error about not being able to change the setting.
Now to the question. How do I set up my PCMCIA and my VGA controler to use different IRQs? In a desktop, I can just set "Plug&Play OS = No" in the BIOS and then reserve IRQs for individual slots. Can I do this with the laptop?
IRQ 11 is used for PCI cards. I don't think this is your problem. Check the PCMCIA Howto on how to configure your card. You need to edit a couple of scripts that do the configuration on insert and removal.
I found Linux handles insertion and removal of cards much better than Windows. Once you have the scripts configured you can insert and remove the cards without hanging the system.
