Wow, this ISA 10base-2 card is very very old. And it didn't work very well back then either. And the cables are tricky too. You need terminating resisters and spacing between taps of 6 feet. I think it was the 3c503 card that was much more stable. The only possible reason to use this card would be to setup a working vintage computer network.
It is setup manually using jumpers to define IRQ, I/O, DMA. and memory address. See
this link for jumper settings. Once you set all those settings, you have to pass the MEM=0xCC00,IRQ=5,and IOBASE=0x300 parameters to the kernel when booting. I did a quick search, but I think the doc is wrong here. So try both. Assuming Irq5, I/O300, Mem address CC00. The last number refers to which transceiver to use - AUI or BNC. It's either zero or one.
"ether=0x300,5,0xCC00,0"
or
"3c501=0x300,5,0xCC00,0"
If those don't work, try them without the "0x".
It's important to note that you can not set any parameter from the command line. You set everything on the card, then you tell the driver what you are using by way of the kernel boot parameters. Once you get the card working, you can add those parameters to the boot config files so they will automatically load.
I'm writing most of this from memory, so you may want to research further.
I have copied the following from the Linux Ethernet How-to
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: 3c501
This obsolete stone-age 8 bit card is really too brain-damaged to use. Avoid it like the plague. Do not purchase this card, even as a joke. It's performance is horrible, and it breaks in many ways.
~snip~
Once again, the use of a 3c501 is strongly discouraged! Even more so with a IP multicast kernel, as you will grind to a halt while listening to all multicast packets. See the comments at the top of the source code for more details.
Good luck
3c501 device eth0 does not seem to be present delaying initialization
