The PCMCIA controller is automatically detected during the installation, thus the cards should be automatically recognised and configured when they are inserted. Hearing two high-pitch beeps shortly after having inserted the card is a good sign; a high-pitch beep followed by a lower-pitch one means that the cards has not been successfully configured. Read the PCMCIA-HOWTO for the gory details.
If you decide to recompile the kernel, you can choose one of the following procedures:
PCMCIA=yes
PCIC=i82365
PCIC_OPTS=
CORE_OPTS=If you rebooted without PCMCIA modules, this file is saved with the name /etc/sysconfig/pcmcia.rpmsave.
Cards are detected and configured, if already inserted, during the bootstrap, as soon as the card manager daemon is started. Depending on your machine, the boot messages can scroll by so fast that you can hardly grasp some of them. All those messages are kept in /var/log/messages where they can be more easily read.