I recently bought an ethernet card. The brand name appears to be OvisLink
(only appearing on the box in sloppy cursive, and the card is in the box,
I can take it out if this matters to anyone), and the model is 8029R. The
following things have come up:
1. Part of the reason I bought it was that I noticed (in the store, on
Lose95, with no way to unpack a tar archieve) that it included a file
'pcilinux.tar' on the driver disk. It also claimed to be NE2000
compatible, which I though at the time was a little surprising, see 2
below. I was full of hope that I would get this card working, having had
bad luck with my last PCI ethernet card. The driver turned out to be for
kernel 1.2.13. How complicated is it to make such a chunk of code work
with 2.x kernels? To make it a module?
2. Since this card claimed to be NE2000 compatible, I recompiled the
kernel with NE2000 support. To do this, I had to choose
Network device support ---> [*] Ethernet (10 or 100Mbit)
[*] Other ISA cards
<*> NE2000/NE1000 support
I was suprised when this worked, or at least appeared to. 'dmesg | less'
shows up the following:
ne.c: PCI BIOS reports ne2000 clone at i/o 0xe000, irq 12.
ne.c:v1.10 9/23/94 Donald Becker (becker@cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov)
NE*000 ethercard probe at 0xe000: 00 4f 49 01 6d 52
eth0: NE2000 found at 0xe000, using IRQ 12.
I not have done any further checking on the correctness of this, since I
don't know how yet and it seems fairly authoritative, but I am still
wondering if everything is working right. If it is, perhaps a new
'NE2000' line should be added to the
EISA, VLB, PCI and on board controllers
subsection of make menuconfig.
__
I like six eggs when starting on a journey. Fried - not poached. And
mind you don't break 'em. I won't eat a broken egg.
-- Thorin Oakenshield