I booted up knoppix 3.4 using both kernel 2.4 and 2.6, both of them have the same trouble when it tries to do

/sbin/ifconfig eth0 up (part of cardmgr)

it just stops there.

Next thing I tried was to send kernel option : nopcmcia.

Well... since it skips the pcmcia and cardmgr part, there was no crash/hang/freezes and I can get in to Knoppix.

Note: This problem not only occurs in knoppix, but to all LiveCD ( Mandrake Move, SuSE Live, Linspire Live) linuxes and to all current Linux versions such as Mandrake since 9.x, Redhat/Fedora, SuSE since 8, and even Slackware since 9.x. But this problem never occurs years before when I used Mandrake 7.x (or the early 8.x). Maybe something about kernel 2.2 and 2.4/2.6 ?

Please help me as I would like to try to use Linux for my old laptop partly due to hard disk size.

I am a FreeBSD user most of the time, but for a laptop with spec as low as :
Toshiba Satellite 2150CDS with HDD as big as 4 gigs, ram for 160mb and 2mb vid-card s3-virge and cpu AMDk6-2 440 mhz with 3D thingie, FreeBSD is not the choice for me due to the size of the software that I would have to install that requires Linux wrapper. Plus obviously degradate performance due to the wrappers.