I have two identical SMC1244TX PCI ethernet cards installed.
At boot time one of two things happens: (per the dmesg output)
eth0 detected (IRQ10) and eth1 not detected. Tulip driver loaded.
OR
eth0 detected(IRQ10) and eth1 detected(IRQ5). Tulip loaded.
eth0 initialized. When eth1 tries to initialize tulip reports an error to the effect that the common memory region is not big enough.

Is it possible to have two identical cards in a linux box?

Other info. I don't have the /sbin/lspci etc output right now. will add later.
New Mandrake 10.0 install (kernel 2.6). Mandrake h/w wizard sees both eth cards in the pci bus scan.
Mandrake internet wizard will not give me the option of defining an internet connection on eth1. eth1 does not appear in the drop down lists. Only eth0.
Module list shows tulip is loaded.
ifconfig etc on eth0 works.

Yes, its fine to have identical cards... sometimes it takes BIOS level tweaking, see if changing the pci irq assignment settings from their undoubtable "auto" and hand assigning helps, see if you can set independant memory mapping. Remember, anything goes absolutely wonko-kazoo and BIOS has that beautiful "return to defaults" option.

Cheers,

Finegan