Firstly, complete hardware idiot here. Linux has spoiled me by always autodetecting hardware. Now I'm stuck.

The situation: Trying to get an ethernet card working on an old 233 Mhz P1, and yes, I did pull it out of a dumpster. It had no network card. I have installed Slackware 10.1, bare.i, no xwindows.
The hardware: PcChips M571 (Sort of a socket7 SIS I think) mboard. AMBIOS version 1.13. 4 PCI slots and 3 ISA slots. I have tried a PCI card and a ISA card with no sucess. They were both unused and boxed. I'm on DSL. Plugging them in and hoping for the best has not worked as neither was detcted properly. Both cards are plug and play and PnP seems enabled in the bios.

ISA card is a d-link DE-220PT 16-bit ethernet.
PCI card is a SMC1244TX.

Most progress so far seems to be with the PCI card.
lspci shows the SMC as 00:0f.0 Linksys Network Everywhere Fast Ethernet 10/100 model NC100 (rev 11). Possibly they are the same card?
ifconfig eth0, device not found
No mention of the card in dmesg. There is a message "Disabling direct PCI/PCI transfers" whatever that means.

I'm not expecting anyone to solve this for me, but where to start? Module, kernel, bios, other? The whole project is just a learning exercise but it would be nice to start pointed in the right direction.

did you do "netconfig" to load the module?

you could start by setting the PNP option in the BIOS to "No"... i've seen tons of cases where having that set to "Yes" caused all kinds problems with NICs... once you've done that, try googling for the right module name for your card and then modprobe it... i did a quick google for your DE-220PT and it seems the module you wanna load is called "ne" according to this link:

http://www.dlink.lt/technical/faq_nic.php

just my ...

I would go with the 32bit pci card
a quick search throws up tulip as the driver.

Thank you very much. I used a little bit of each of your suggestions. Now I can ping the router.

Now how do you configure a d-link router without x? Looks like I've got more reading to do lol.

you can probably telnet into it
telnet 192.168.0.1 or whatever dlink uses as default gateway address.
you really need to read the router instructions, the telnet commands will be the same as for windows

tobyl

lynx and links are non GUI web browser applications.

Well, I'm posting from the dumpster machine using lynx.
Very retro-cool even though it took 15 minutes to figure out how to get to this page
Thanks again, needed all of your posts to reach this point.