Flash Card problems (and solutions)

Ok, so I managed to buy 4 linear flash cards from ebay. They are Centennial 2MB devices. The alios site gives brief details of how to load alios onto a card, so I thought this would be easy!
I have a hp omnibook 6000,with redhat 7.3 so I tried to use this to program the cards - no luck! Kept getting lots of 'cannot allocate memory' errors and segmentation faults when writing!
After lots of messing around, I got it to work as follows:

• Rebuild the 2.4.18 kernel, with PCMCIA support disabled
• Get the stand-alone PCMCIA package from sourceforge.
• Build this, then modify the /etc/sysconfig/pcmcia file to use the standalone PCIC controller, rather than yenta_socket

After all this, It works! I can now program the cards sucessfully.
One note: I could not use the method specified with the alios source. Instead, I generate a 2MB image on disk, then write the whole image to flash, using a 128Kb block size. This works fine.