I was wondering if you guys would mind helping a kid out... I started fooling around with different linux flavors recently. I started out with slackware 9.0 and now Im working with red hat 9.0 now... A little backwords to start with, I know. Everything works pretty well with my new box I scraped together today except my nic card. I tried looking for the nics chipset on places like deja.com but no good... My guess is that since my nic is a Microsoft branded nic linux users didnt go for it much... To try to make this shorter should I try to find the chipset and keep going with it or just jump down the road to the Radio Shack and pickup a SMC or 3COM nic?

You can find out what chipset is on the card by lspci. That is, at a command line prompt, type:

lspci

It will list everything on your PCI bus. Should be a good place to start.

PS. thats lspci with a lower case L, not an upper case I.

thanks for the help... but it just says

bash: lspci: command not found

... i think i might smack red hat down and throw debian on there... i heard the apt-get command is pretty slick anyway...

Oooooops! My bad.

If you are not logged in as root, then you must specify the path, i.e.

/sbin/lspci

Sorry about that. So what does it show?

PS. if you are not happy with RedHat, another good suggestion is Slackware; largely because, I would argue, it is the simplest and cleanest major distro, and (outside of sticking to BSD style system rc) tries the hardest to be straight ahead gospel (*nix) Linux.

/sbin/lspci it WILL be there already on a standard base redhat install. i bet you weren't root when you tried that

the funny thing is i WAS root... however when i typed /sbin/lspci it worked...
and the line i need reads:

00:09.0 Ethernet controler: Microsoft Corporation: Unknown device 0002 (rev 11)

GAK!!! Leave it to BillG. I think you are off to the wonderful world of Google to try and find out what the chip set is, or as you say, pick up an uncontaminated ;-) nic. The latter may be easier in the long run.... BillG probably took care to futz with the chipset so that it won't work with the supporting drivers....

alrighty... thanks for your help... atleast i learned a new command out of it... ill just run down to the closest computer store and just pick one up later...


again thanks