PC-Card

This article describes the setup of PC-Card (also known as PCMCIA) controllers.

Kernel
You need to activate the following kernel options:

Software
Portage knows the global USE flag pcmcia for enabling support for PC-Cards in other packages. Enabling this USE flag will pull in automatically:

After setting this you want to update your system so the changes take effect:

You want to install pcmciautils yourself, if it isn't already pulled in:

Card Information Structure
A PC-Card has a firmware called Card Information Structure. Some CISs are flawed, but you can patch them at boot time. For them install :

Resource database
Some old 16-bit PCMCIA cards works only, if a resource database is set up. This affects only x86 and x86_64 computers and also not all. To find out, if you need the database, have a look at your controllers PCI-ID. You can use lspci for this task, e.g.:

If the first two numbers are not zeros (here in bold: 03), then you need no resource database. If they are zeros, you need to copy the database to /etc/pcmcia/config.opts:

Edit it to your needs.

Usage
You can use pccardctl (part of pcmciautils) to show informations about the PC-Card controller and the inserted cards and to load and unload cards.