Network Cards

[MANI SRIDHAR <msridhar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Friends
    I have posted this question a couple of times on the list - rest
assured i got replies. I;m not posting the same question again. I have
been planning to somehow salvage an old 286 at home ( and theres an 8088
too ) and use it with linux - at least as a dumb terminal. I did do my
homework rgarding network cards / ethernet , mainly by reading ethernet
howto. But i still have some doubts.
   My idea is to buy a PCI card for the Pentium machine that runs Linux. I
went to a lot of shops in Madras ( my fellow chennai linuxers, i;'m
talking about Ritchie Street ). They don't seem to have stocks of the
D-Link network card, which I remember Atul telling somebody on the list,
was a no-problem card as far as linux was concerned. There were other
cards - Compex, Genius and all of them, the shop keepers claimed, were
NE2000 clones. Now, can somebody briefly tell me how linux comes to know
about these cards when you put them in ? i guess the PCI cards are
autodetected, right ?
   now to the 286. this machine has no harddisk and all i have is a dos
boot floppy. le us say i do get an ISA card. how do i go about getting to
use it ? None of the ISA cards i saw at the shops had any disks with the,m
- - and even when they did have them, they were merely installation disks
for Windoze.
    i'd really appreciate it if somebody could take the time to answer. As
Atul says, I'm willing to experiment on my own a bit, but i need to know
the ground
rules first. 
   one more thing - i have a lot of coax cable at home - so wouldn't i be
better of if i tried BNC with 10Base2 ?
   and yet another thing - rather than use my 286 as a plain vanilla dumb
terminal, is there somewhere i can get Xenix or something for the 286 so
that i can give it an IP address and play around with routing ? I did
search many engines for links on Xenix, but all drew a blank.
Thanks in Advance
Mani Sridhar

*****************************************************************************
All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.

Faith is to believe in what you do not see. The reward of this faith is to
see what you believe in.
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Mani Sridhar
1, Navarathna Avenue
Anna Colony
Besant Nagar
Madras 
INDIA - 600 090

Phone / Fax : +91 44 491 9055
Email : msridhar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx



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