Upon installing VL 7 Light on my circa 1999 laptop, no adapter card was recognized, or even powered, when plugged into the laptop's single PCMCIA port. However, port and cards worked with VL 6 Light Live on the same computer. A comparison of dmesg outputs from both distros indicated that VL 7 Light had disabled ACPI support, while ACPI was needed in VL 6 Light Live to enable the PCMCIA cards.
The problem was corrected in VL 7 Light by adding acpi=force to each of the 'append' statements in /etc/lilo.conf, then issuing the command '/sbin/lilo -v' to commit the changes to the LILO bootloader, and finally rebooting.
If you're using GRUB, the following ought to do it (but I haven't tested it...): add acpi=force to the 'GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX' statement(s) in /etc/default/grub, then issue the command 'update-grub' to commit the changes to the GRUB bootloader, and finally reboot.
Of course, all of the above needs to be done from root.
Hope this helps somebody out there in VL-land!
For a bit more detail on the cause and solution, see
http://techsquirrels.blogspot.com/2013/05/getting-vector-linux-to-recognize.html.
