Baslinux mailing list

[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

On Sat, 8 May 2004, Sindi Keesan wrote:

> At Kiwanis club I got back three of the 20 or so ethernet cards I had
> donated.  THey also have lots of cables (shorter than our 50' one).  There
> are no cards with BNC connectors there, just the phone-jack type, half of
> them being ISA, which the linux HOWTO said to avoid because you need to
> specify the base address and IRQ in modules.conf.  I got a matched pair of
> Kingston and another with a winbond chip which is also on ours.

My experience with ISA NIC's and Linux is as follows: avoid the ISA
plug-n-play cards (jumperless).  Any ISA NIC with jumpers that is
supported under Linux (i.e., there's a module for it) should work fine for
you.  Most I've had to specify to insmod is IRQ - base address has not
been needed.  And how much trouble is this anyway?  Just stick a line like
"insmod smc-ultra irq=10" in /etc/rc.d/rc.S (think that's where it goes)
and you're done.  It gets loaded with those settings every time you boot.
What's so troublesome about that?  The jumperless ISA cards, on the other
hand, have proven difficult in my experience.  First, without disabling
pnp, you can't even use them - unless, I suppose, you can get isapnptools
running under BL, which is a challenge in itself.  If not, you have to
find the manufacturer's software for the NIC that will allow such things
as disabling pnp and manually setting IRQ/IO.  That's *if* you can even
find such software.  And even then it might not work (I'm speaking of the
Intel clone NIC's I mentioned in an earlier message and the troubles I
went through trying to use them).

Thus, the following rule: if ISA NIC, choose jumpered.

James

PS Hal makes a good point about crossover cables if you're using UTP
directly between machines without intervening hub/switch/router.  And coax
is much simpler to set up in such situations, as he notes.