I tested it with a PCMCIA network card, and it works fine. The smartcard reader is also recognized as such a device.

You need to enable the following things in the kernel:

Bus options (PCI, PCMCIA, EISA, MCA, ISA)  --->
  PCMCIA/CardBus support  --->
    PCMCIA/CardBus support
    CardBus yenta-compatible bridge support

I made them both as modules, and so I do a

modprobe pcmcia_core
modprobe ds
modprobe yenta_socket

to activate them. I'm not sure if I need the pcmcia-cs package from sourceforge, because cardctl and cardmgr were there before I installed it.