I installed RedHat 7.0, however it failed to detect the network card - a ISA RealTek RTL8019(AS). I understand this is a clone of the NE2000. and a check revealed that the installation does include the NE2000 driver, so presumably that is not the problem.

I tried Don Beckers (becker@scyld.com) Diagnostic program ne2k-diag.c: for NE2000 ethercards, and this produced the following
output:

Checking the ethercard at 0x300.
Register 0x0d (0x30d) is ff
Failed initial NE2000 probe, value ff.
8390 registers: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
SA PROM 0: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
SA PROM 0x10: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff

Invalid signature found, wordlength 2.

I also tried isapnptools, it ran but it did not appear do anything, this may be due to the fact that I did'nt really understand how to setup the config file.

I would greatly appreciate it if somebody out there could help

I had a similar problem way back with kernel 2.2. Took me about a couple days to figure out isapnp.. Finally I fetched the 2.4 kernel and used that instead. Seemed to autoconfigure most of it. Isapnp configuration is a pain in the butt..

Oh one more think, there's a rtl8019 module you should use instead of NE2k, I think thats what I used.

If you still want to use isapnp, then do a probe and save it into a file. What it does is dump all your isa information it can get in stdout. So you save it as /etc/isapnp.conf, uncomment the lines that configure something, change your desired io/irq, and try running isapnp /etc/isapnp.conf. If it seems to work, uncomment the row at the end that says (ACTIVATE Y) and run it again. You should be set. Don't know about RH but slackware checks for /etc/isapnp.conf at sysinit and runs it..

I'm sure there's a tutorial on tldp.org, I can't be too specific since I dont have access to a machine with similar config..

I had the same problem.

I added the following lines to my /etc/modules.conf

alias eth0 ne
options ne io=0x300 irq=5


This tells Linux:

You are using a NE2000 clone (alias eth0 ne)
You want to use i/o 300 and interrupt 5 (options ne io=0x300 irq=5)


It will not work if the card is not a NE2000 clone. Your card's documentation should tell you the i/o and interrupt values that can be used.