Re: Ethernet-Card for Laptop
On Sat, Oct 30, 1999 at 11:28:07PM +0200, Michael Thaler wrote:
> Hello!
>
> I want to buy a pcmcia-ethernet-card for my notebook. I have a Sharp
> 9090 and I want to establish a little network with an old Pentium 75.
>
> First, is a 10 MBit/s card enough or should I buy a 100 MBit/s card?
> Are these cards much more expensive?
10 MBit/s is sure to be plenty. I don't think I've ever actually even seen a
100MBit/s network, though my card is capable of using one. Typically
I never get speeds over 1MBit/s anyway, so there's a lot of excess
capability in a 10 MBit/s network. I guess you only really need to
think about a 100M network if you have a lot of machines on your
network and you're heavy stuff like video conferencing or large
data-bases.
There's something else you should probably be aware of. Because of
limitations in the bus transferring data between computer and network
card, a 100Mbit/s pcmcia (16bit) card actually has a maximum rate of
20Mbit/s. A 100M CardBus (32bit) card has a maximum of 80Mbit/s.
> Furthermore, are there any problems with these cards or do they
> generaly run with Linux? Are there any prefered cards?
I have a Zircom combo pcmcia card (10/100 ethernet + 56K modem (+GSM,
ISDN...it's a cool card ;) ) which works great. But it's probably not
the cheapest you can find, and other brands can be fine too. Just
make sure there's a Linux driver for it first. In particular, I'm not sure how
well-tested the Linux support for the cardbus cards is.
Good luck,
Drew
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