I finally got my Toshiba Portege 3480CT working with a HD install of knoppix 3.6 and the orinoco gold card was working fine, and still does when I boot from the cd. First few reboots after the HD install it still worked but now does not. I surfed around these forums and found other people with these problems, seems some received them after apt-get update? Which could very well be what I'm doing, I know I did the update but I can't recall if that's when I first couldn't get the card to work again. When booting I get this:

cardmgr [419]: starting, version is 3.2.5
cardmgr [419]: socket 0: Lucent Technologies WaveLAN/IEEE Adapter
cardmgr [419]: executing: 'modprobe hermes'
cardmgr [419]: executing: 'modprobe orinoco'
cardmgr [419]: executing: 'modprobe orinoco_cs'
cardmgr [419]: executing: './network start eth0'
cardmgr [419]: + iwconfig eth0 essid "banelap"
cardmgr [419]: +Sample private network setup
cardmgr [419]: + /sbin/ifconfig eth0 up
cardmgr [419]: + /sbin/pump -i eth0 > /dev/null

then after a few other commands different colors, usb firewire video and partitions detection

Network device eth0 detected, DHCP broadcasting for IP. (Backgrounding)
(i dont know if this conflicts with the cardmgr?)

then for some reason:
(Re)starting PCMCIA services.
cardmgr[1028]: open_sock(socket 0) failed: Device or resource busy
cardmgr[419]: + Operation Failed.
cardmgr[419]: start cmd exited with status 1

If anyone has any suggestions they would be appreciated. If anyone has questions about how to get X running with this laptop or a Savage/IX I now know how to do it. (kinda) so send an email if you need help