Re: NE2500 NIC

[Phil Brutsche <pbrutsch@creighton.edu>]

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far way, someone said...

> I just salvaged a P100 system that the local university was throwing
> out and am trying to set it up with an NE2500 ethernet card.  The
> card, however, is not cooperating... thanks to Plug 'n' Pray.

Hrm... A quick grep through the kernel source indicates that this card
uses the AMD PCnet (aka lance) chipset.  The driver is lance.o.  What
specific problems are you having with this card?

> The only ISA NICs I have, however, are a pair of NE2500s and the card
> that was in the machine when I got it - and I have no idea what kind
> of card that one is.

You might want to try some fairly radical ways of figuring out what this
mystery card is.  It's one of the few things Windows 9x is good for (the
other two are wasting time and playing computer games.  However, some
might say those two are indistinguishable).  The last time I tried SuSE
(around 6.1 or so) it had a pretty nifty PnP setup where it would try to
load all NIC drivers until it found one that worked.  You might try that.

> (Google searches on the more important-looking of the numbers on the
> chips turned up no matches.  The only text is the name "Fil-Mag" on
> one of the chips, which allowed me to identify the chip as a filter.)

I find that Google is useless more often than not - Yahoo! still works
better (IMO).

> The NE2500s have a DOS-based config program which supposedly lets you turn
> PnP off, but it complains that the card's EEPROM is the wrong revision and I
> need to run the NE2500 patch program.

Could the DOS program tell you what the IRQ & I/O settings are?  Based on
my (admittedly limited) experience with this chipset, they don't use
jumpers, but still aren't PnP.

On that thought, AMD's web site might be of some help.

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Phil Brutsche					pbrutsch@creighton.edu

"There are two things that are infinite; Human stupidity and the
universe. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein