Thinkpad 600E and udev

Question

I've been booting Arch on every single +686 device I own.  So far, there has been much success.
Most recently, I installed 0.8 beta 2 Voodoo on a Thinkpad 600E (366Mhz P2, 256Mb ram, 5Gb hd).  Previously booted Puppy Linux.
This has been largely a failure.  Udev takes ages to scan.  Sound modules refuse to load ( "CS4236+ soundcard not found or device busy" ) and more critically, PCMCIA drivers are not working.  The correct modules are there (yenta socket, pcmcia core, etc), but pccard utils do not recognize anything.  Cards do not even power up.  As the laptop has no onboard ethernet, getting a wifi card running is a top priority. 
I've followed the recommendations on
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/IBM … 645-CBH%29
except for the DVD overlay option, as no X server has been installed yet.
A quick comparison of lsmod between Puppy (where wifi and sound work) and Arch show that Arch is not missing any modules Puppy loaded and loaded about three times as many modules.
I think udev is at fault.  But udev has never let me down before.  I'm not quite sure where to begin fixing things.   Anyone have similar trouble?  Any system reports that would be useful to diagnose?  Dmesg is nothing but several hundred "CS4236+ soundcard not found or device busy", which really doesn't help with the PCMCIA problems.
Thanks.

Answer 1

I'm a newb to Arch, having decided to switch from Ubuntu, and have also had the traditional struggle with sound on the 600E.  I started with the 2009.8 install and followed the beginner's guide.
After some false starts, I've ended up with this in /etc/rc.conf:
MOD_AUTOLOAD="yes"
#MOD_BLACKLIST=() #deprecated
MODULES=(!snd_cs46xx !snd_cs461x !snd_cs4232 !pcihp !snd_cs4236)
and it works.  I do not have any other config information in place.  In particular, using the "options snd-cs4236..." line in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf seemed to make it fail to boot properly, so that file is now empty (or at any rate, all commented out).  I have no idea why (apparently) blacklisting the module that's actually needed works, but it seems to,
I've also got this:
# added DL 23.dec.09
options snd-pcsp index=2
in /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf but I don't think that's directly relevant.
The output of "lsmod | grep snd" may be helpful:
snd_seq_dummy 2720 0
snd_seq_oss 31232 0
snd_seq_midi_event 7036 1 snd_seq_oss
snd_seq 53808 5 snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq_midi_event
snd_cs4236 30996 1
snd_wss_lib 25884 1 snd_cs4236
snd_opl3_lib 10364 1 snd_cs4236
snd_hwdep 7712 1 snd_opl3_lib
snd_pcm_oss 40320 0
snd_mixer_oss 17564 1 snd_pcm_oss
snd_mpu401_uart 7548 1 snd_cs4236
snd_rawmidi 21888 1 snd_mpu401_uart
snd_seq_device 6792 5 snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq,snd_opl3_lib,snd_rawmidi
snd_pcm 74496 3 snd_cs4236,snd_wss_lib,snd_pcm_oss
snd_timer 21188 4 snd_seq,snd_wss_lib,snd_opl3_lib,snd_pcm
snd 58820 15 snd_seq_oss,snd_seq,snd_cs4236,snd_wss_lib,snd_opl3_lib,snd_hwdep,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_mpu401_uart,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq_device,snd_pcm,snd_timer
soundcore 6944 1 snd
snd_page_alloc 8900 2 snd_wss_lib,snd_pcm