RE: Ethernet-Card for Laptop
> From: Drew Parsons [mailto:dfparsons@ucdavis.edu]
> 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
Never get speeds over 1 megaBIT, or 1 megaBYTE? A 10 MBit network will give
you at most 1,000 KiloBYTES/s. That's because there's 10 bits per byte when
you send over the network. (10 Mbits/s / 10 bits/byte = 1 MByte/s) Most
machines I've seen can get at least 400 Kbyte/s over a 10 Mbit network,
which is still well above the 1MBit/s (100 KByte/s) you mentioned.
> 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.
Most machines these days can easily keep up a 1 MByte/s transfer rate. If
you can afford it, I would certainly recommend going the 100 Mbit (10
Mbyte/sec) route. It'll save a LOT of time if you routinely transfer large
files. If you are just sending the occasional file or print job over the
network, 10 MBit is probably good enough.
> > 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.
I have tried a few "generic" 10 Mbit PCMCIA cards on my Debian laptop. I
haven't had any problems with these cards, which probably all use the same
hardware internally. By Generic, I mean those no-name sorts of cards like
"Ovislink"...
Good luck.
Richard Glidden
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