I spent a couple of hours Googling around until I found this page. I am running Debian Testing with kernel 2.4.26-1-686 on an IBM TP-390E trying to load a Linksys WPC55AG and was getting the following key lines in syslog:

cardmgr[XXX]: unsupported card in socket 0
.
.
.
kernel: PCI: No IRQ known for interrupt Pin A of device. Please try using pci-biosirq.
kernel: ath_pci: cannot reserve PCI memory region
kernel: ath_pci: No devices found, drivers not installed.

For some reason I started poking around in my /etc/default/pcmcia script and saw that I had PCIC=”i82365″ and tried setting it to “yenta_socket”. That failed so I searched the Debian packages page and found that the yenta_socket driver is in the kernel-pcmcia-modules-2.4.26-1-686 package which replaces pcmcia-modules-2.4.26-1-686 which I had installed. After installing the kernel PCMCIA modules and editing /etc/defaults/pcmcia to PCIC=”yenta_socket” and starting /etc/init.d/pcmcia the modules loaded successfully and the card is powered.

Please note with regard to editing the pcmcia-cs scripts as shown above:

At the bottom of the /etc/pcmcia/config-2.4 script there is a line that sources ./*.conf for local drivers. So I created atheros.conf and added the new stanzas there. By the way, my cardmgr complained about the colon following manfid so my line looks like this:

manfid 0x0271, 0x0012

I have pcmcia-cs 3.2.5-8 installed.

I hope this helps others that are getting the same error. Apparently, only the kernel PCMCIA modules will allow this card’s IRQ to be seen when using the yenta_socket.o driver.