I have been having problems activating my network cards in Linux. I finally tried doing it from the command line using "config eth0 up" and got the error message back, "SIOCSIFFLAGS Device or resource busy". Over here at Linuxquestions, a brief search of SIOCSIFFLAGS in all the forums turned up a sea of posts discussing the exact same problem. The solution seems to be to turn off PnP in the BIOS. I'm sure it will work for me too, but I dual boot with Windows XP and I am worried about the consequence of such a change. Nobody seems to be reporting any problems with either operating system, but reallistically, how often is the PnP feature actually utilized and isn't it utilized for Linux too? When I want to install another piece of hardware, I really don't want to have to worry about some BIOS setting.

Why is this hack necessary for this problem? Is there a problem at all? What is the purpose of the PnP setting in the BIOS anyway? Is somebody working on this issue?