Severn/Fedora hangs during boot at PCMCIA?

[Mark G. Spencer]

Hello,

I became interested in upgrading one of my laptops from Red Hat 9 to Severn
after hearing that some improvements significantly increased the overall
responsiveness on older computer systems. My laptop is older, and painfully
slow under the load of Gnome.  ;)

I'm hoping you all can help me resolve two of the major problems I've had.

My laptop is a Toshiba 2615DVD/6.0.  It's an older Celeron based machine.  

Red Hat 9 installs and runs without any problems, including after I upgraded
to the latest kernel (non-beta) from RHN.

When I tried to install Severn on this laptop, it would always hang at
"running /sbin/loader" .. After browsing Google for a while, I found a
mention of disabling usb via "linux nousb" at install.  I did this, and I
was able to get past the hang and continue installation.

Once the system boots now though, it hangs at starting PCMCIA services.
I've tried booting a few times and waited up to 30 minutes, so I know at
this point I will never get past starting PCMCIA services.

Any ideas?  Is this a bug, or is some support for older chipsets removed on
purpose from Severn?  Is there a way for me to troubleshoot why usb and
pcmcia work fine on Red Hat 9 on this laptop, but not on Severn.

Thanks for the advice .. I'm really looking forward to getting Severn and
the latest 2.6 kernel running on this laptop now that I've heard so many
good things about them!!

Mark