The card has a realtek 8169 chip. I thought everything was great when the system automatically detected it and loaded the r8169 driver. However, the system did not detect the link status properly (when I had it hooked to GigE) so it didn't work. I downloaded the r1000 driver source code from Realtek's website. It had a bug in it which prevented it from compiling without modification. After googling and finding out what needed to be changed, I was able to build and install it and it worked. Although (after the sources are fixed), it is easy to update the driver each time the kernel is updated, it's also easy to forget to do it. Hopefully the r1000 driver will make it into the stock kernel eventually.

This card works very well under Linux. It was not detected out of the box for me, but that's because I run Gentoo and strip about everything I don't actually have at the moment out of the kernel. (It makes the kernel and module set quicker to compile at the expense of having to recompile the kernel if you add hardware.) So I had to recompile the kernel to include the r8169 kernel module. I don't like to compile in a whole lot of modules, so I then put a line with "r8169" in /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 so that it would be loaded automatically at boot. After that, the card showed up perfectly and works like a charm.

A few things I do have to say is that I wish the card was a PCI Express model as most new motherboards have several (3-5+) available PCIe slots but only 1 or 2 PCI slots. My board, an Abit KN8-SLi, has no less than 3 PCIe x1 slots and a spare PCIe x16 slot that a PCIe x1 NIC could have fit into. But it has only 2 PCI slots, both on the bottom of the board so that the bottom PCI slot is not even really usable. Also, you will need to set the MTU of the card to 7200 from the default 1500- this allows the jumbo frames that give gigabit Ethernet a lot of its speed. 1500 is right for a 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet card but will limit your data rate on a gigabit card to roughly 150 Mbps (~14 MB/sec.) With the bigger MTU I can't saturate the link with file transfers (~70 MB/sec from a 10k Raptor.) However, you will need to enable jumbo frames or set the MTU to be the same on *all* gigabit NICs in your network.

The first time i plugged this card in it would only go up to 100Mbs Full-Duplex, but after a restart it now works at full speed. I've read a lot of horror stories regarding this card, but aside from this one little glitch, it's been working great for me.