Re: slacware not detecting my ethernet card

["Dr. P. Sriram" <sriram@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(warning: a bit lengthy)

hi,

the RL2000 card is a piece of junk, if i may be a bit blunt. the ne2000 is
an old 16 bit design and was not bad for its time. the compex ne2000 clone
is also not a bad card (for its time). both these cards were basically isa
bus cards. now with the onslaught of pci, compex put some glue on its
ne2000 clone so that the card will interface with the pci bus and voila,
you have the RL2000 - which sales critters will claim is a 32 bit card
since it has the 32bit pci interface on it. but look at any technical
information and it wont take long to figure out that it is basically a 16
bit card with a 32 bit interface. this is what causes slackware (and other
old versions of linux) to get confused and think the card is a ne1000
card. you can edit some source code and re-compile and get this card to
work (we did); but frankly, it is simply not worth the trouble. the source
code additions have been incorporated in later releases so that current
redhat versions (for example) will work with this card without any
problem. some tricks may be in order to disable the plug-and-play features
that assign irq and io address at boot time (as explained at the june
chennailug meeting). it may also be possible to download the current
drivers (ne.c) and compiling it into the old slackware source. the easiest
solution would be to upgrade to a later version of linux.

sriram



------------------------------