You Guys,

Complete Linux newbie, chuffed that I even managed to get Redhat 8.0 downloaded and installed! The only thing it didn't pick up was my NIC (SiS 900). All the advice I've found so far is way over my head - recompiling the kernel and so on. Can anyone recommend a NIC that they found "just worked", that is, minimum effort & config?

Other NIC advice appreciated if offered.

Cheers,
cptn

Intel pro100
3Com 3c905

And if you want gigabit, the Intel pro/1000 works with their driver or the one in the 2.4.20 kernel (which is almost the same one)

personally i'd say always go for a generic 8139 based card. generic cards get you so so so much further in linux than windows, so even a bog standard unbranded 8139 card will have out of the box support as that chip is so common, copared to otehr chipsets which may well work better under windows due to inhouse developement of drivers. whereas under linux the amount of development is going to more likely to be related to how common it is rather than how much money the manufacturers have

I'll check that out & let you know how it goes.

its your time & $, but this site seems to lay it out:
http://esmith.ss.ics.tut.ac.jp/jchakma/LINUX/nic.html

OK, let's close the call.

Worked out that the card was fine, it just couldn't get an IP address from the switch. It worked (that is, it didn't fail during the boot sequence) when I assigned it an IP address, but it couldn't ping it's way out of a paper bag. Fiddled with many settings & config scripts to no avail.

Also, the Windows machine got hella confused when it had one NIC with DHCP (for the net) and one with a static IP (to talk to Redhat).

So I made a tactical withdrawal - dual boot Redhat with XP. XP sees the network fine, and I've set up a mount point to it's partition in Redhat. Works fine.

Now I can play about with it and still have the connectivity I need. The networking can live to fight another day.

Thanks to all who chipped in - it's all one great learning experience.

cptn