My network adapter isnt working. I just installed Red Hat 7.3 on a p2 350mghtz machine. I wonder if I need a driver for it. I tried looking for netware because that is what's on the card, but I did not find anything about network cards. I do not know much about it. It was given to me. I do know that it is not a pci nic card. It plugs into ISA. Here are a few pictures of it. picture1 picture2 picture3 picture4 or try downloading them from because my bandwidth exceeded. Try looking here Can anyone help? Will this device run under Linux? I have searched for it, but I am not even sure what to search for.

After some googling, I believe it has a ne2000 chipset, in which case you'll want the ne driver.
If it doesn't work, play around with the io and irq parameters.

My general experience with so called "NE2000 compatible" ISA network cards has been very poor, at least with Windows 98 (I didn't use Linux back then). At least with Windows, the NE2000 driver rarely worked and I'd have to use the driver on the floppy. Otherwise, Windows with the standard NE2000 driver it would THINK the card was functioning normally but it would never be able to actually do anything (like browse the network or Internet or even ping).

I've played around with Knoppix a little bit with those "NE2000 compatible" ISA cards with somewhat better luck, but it simply was never worth it. At 10megabit speeds, even simple file transfers would time out mysteriously. Worse still, it drags down the connection speeds of whatever else it's connected to.

A computer as fast as that 350mhz Pentium II deserves a 100megabit fast ethernet PCI card. They are absolutely dirt cheap.

Fakie_flip,

I had one like this lying around for years, but I eventually I threw it away because I could not get it to work. The "YES" label indicates that it is a NE1000 or NE2000 compatible.

PNP never worked for me on these cards.

I see on your pictures that the card IS in PNP mode. Have you tried to put it in legacy mode?

If you did, did you think about assigning the IRQ to "legacy" in the BIOS setting?

Did you enter the correct settings in the modules.conf file? (Might be named differently in RH)

alias eth0 ne
options ne io=0x340 irq=10

I humbly disagree with IsaacKuo: it is a shame that hardware is thrown away after two years because there is something faster on the market. I run a variety of Linux machines, and 6 of them are 400 MHz or less. All with legacy hardware. It is fun to be able to use something which cannot be used in Windoze anymore. BTW.... if you run Windoze with roaming profiles, everytime you log in, Windoze copies your ENTIRE home directory: mail, internet temporary files, my documents, everything. It is not unusual for a such a copy operation to last for 15 or 30 minutes. No wonder people want to buy gigabit networks. Only for that reason I am against it!

jlinkels

I think maybe you misunderstand my meaning. To me, a 350mhz machine is easily fast enough to warrant 100mhz Fast Ethernet instead of 10mhz.

And it's no shame to throw away a so-called "NE2000 compatible" YES card (ah, I've got one of those), when it doesn't actually work right. We're not talking about two year old equipment here, more like ten years.

IsaacKuo,

I agree with you, a PIII-350 is fast enough for 100 Mbit. Provided it runs Luvix, but that goes without saying.

And I also think there is much more fun in trying to get an ancient 10 MBit adapter to work again, as opposed to throwing it away and buy a new 100 Mbit adapter.

By re-using this old-stuff I also want to make a personal statement which expresses my disgust for marketing faster stuff and throwing away perfectly good working but slower hardware, which is done only to compensate for slow and inefficient software.

jlinkels

jlinkles,


You da' man!! Thank god for early-acceptors, they really help push the envelope.

Realistically, if you're not running a data center, web server, mirror or entertainment hub, then 10MHz easily ought to satisfy a vast number of recreational networking weenies; particularly when using Linux. Couldn't concur with you more regarding Window$ and need for more throughput (100Mb-1Gb).

Regret joining the topic belately, but after a 2 year sabbatical from Linux I'm ready to dive back in. I'm reviving a Socket 7 mobo with an AMD K6/3-450, 256MB/PC100 RAM, ISA NIC and Soundcard along with a PCI video card. Mdk10.2 is the OS of choice for my mainserver (SSH, NFS, DNS, etc.). I anticipate configuring clients on various PI, PII-MMX and PIII boxes with Mepis, RH, Peanut and Debian. (Oh yeah, virtual machines will be utitlized where possible/practical.) The lowest grade PI (200/66MHz max., Intel 430VX chipset) is pre-USB, pre-AMD/Cryix, pre-DIMM and lacking CD-ROM boot capability.

The ISA NIC, a LinkSys LNE2000, poses the biggest challenge. Research suggests that I'll need to disable the card's PnP in DOS first (soft jumpers) and then manipulate IRQ and addressing with modprobe or Harddrake. All of which sounds reasonable and vaguely familiar, but none of my sources took the process to its obvious conclusion. Incidentally, I retained the original documentation and drivers which include dated *NIX drivers (AT&T UNIX, NETWARE, SCO-UNIX, Solaris and UNIXWARE), just no Linux drivers.

So, we'll see how Mandriva's 2005 LE handles autoconfiguring the NIC with NE2000 drivers during installation and thereafter with Harddrake and/or modprobe if necessary. Any insights you or anyone else could impart are always welcome.


All the best,


woody