Hello there,

I am looking into purchasing an NIC, and would like one that is compatible with Linux.

Can anyone point me in the direction of a list of compatible hardware and/or recommend a cheap and compatible product?

Thanks in advance,

Sam

oh and btw i'm running mandrake 9.1

You can get a very cheap realtek clone in any computer store. just make sure the main chip on the card is marked rtl8139. Should be yours for just about $10 or at max $20. Most of these clones are half size cards.

There are two generation of drivers for that card out there. 8139too and rtl8139. Go for the later one. Since you are running Mandrake I suppose the distro and kudzu will do the work for you. The drivers are within the kernel source tree so you should not need any dl or such. GL networking!

Cool thanks for the advice

I had no problem whatsoever with those realtek cards, and I also tried a 3com 3c509 with no trouble. I like the 2 com better, it can handle more of a load than the realtek ones could...

I have a Realtec rtl8139d and my RH 8 kudzu is not finding it... I have an old 90mhz pentium that I am setting up as a firewall/router, but the cards aren't being found. Is there a way to manually install devices?

First step is find a module that works. The most commonly used 8139 driver seems to be 8139too, so 'modprobe 8139too' might work. Useful commands then are (have to be root to configure the interface)

ifconfig (list active interfaces)
ifdown eth0 (shut down first ethernet interface)
ifup eth0 (try to open first internet interface)

If this works you can add a line

alias eth0 8139too

to the file /etc/modules.conf, which should automatically load this module when needed.

I typed 'lspci' and I found my two cards, however it is not comming on kudzu and it isn't in ifconfig eth0 either. When I type ifconfig eth0, I get the response: unknown interface: no such device. The problem isn't in the config, it's in the drivers.

So what drivers have you tried to load with 'modprobe'? Googling on 'rtl8139d linux' reveals quite a bit of kernel patching going on, and also suggestions to try the 8139cp driver. What happens if (as root) you do 'modprobe 8139cp' or 'modprobe 8139too' ??

Here is some more information. I purchased 10 Realtek ethernet cards.... I am using all of them on various RH8 machines, most of which are relatively newer Athlon 850 and above. They had no problem finding and installing the cards. The problem is the old pentium 90 with sketchy plug and play support and the fact that the pci slots are located on a riser card off the board, leads me to believe that the problem is with kudzu not recognizing the riser card which in turn won't recognize the cards. Hope that helps alittle...

Here is the output for the modprobe: /lib/modules/2.4.18-14/kernel/drivers/net/8139too.o: init_module: NO such device.

Another problem arises when I try to use a floppy that I made with the downloaded Lynux drivers, it keeps telling it can't find a valid FAT filesystem on dev 02:00. I tried formating floppies with FAT and EXT2, and neither of them are being accepted...