Re: RT Linux

>
> From: Jon Elson <jmelson@...>
>
>
>
> Ian Wright wrote:
>
> > From: "Ian Wright" <Ian@...>
> >
> > Thanks Jon,
> >
> > I looked at the HOW-TO but couldn't see anything which seemed to correlate
> > with anything written on these cards but I assumed that, since they seem to
> > have the word 'ethernet' on them a number of times, they would probably be
> > supported, at least, by some kind of generic driver - perhaps not.
>
> No, absolutely not. The generic VGA is a fully specified register set, and
> most video cards will function properly with a generic VGA driver.
>
> There is no such thing for ethernet. There are plug-and-play versions, and
> non plug-and-play. There are ones with BIOS roms, and with none.
> There are bus mastering, DMA, programmed-I/O, and ISA RAM
> memory interfaces, in 8-bit and 16-bit, as well as PCI. There are
> ones with UTP only, BNC only, AUI only, and any combination of
> the above physical connections. And, the network protocol chips range
> from the well-known DEC Tulip and Intel chips, to far-out Taiwan
> semi-clones.
>
> Jon

I really like the Linksys 10/100 PCI EtherFast that uses a variant of the
DEC Tulip chip. Very fast. Very dependable and now it looks like they're
around $29. We put these in all of our networks; haven't had a failure
in 3 years. Works great with Linux as well as Windows.

In one instance, we ended up replacing some noname cards that had been
OEM'd in the PCs with Linksys. There were causing very wierd errors
with one customer program. Really hard to track down. Now we just
make sure everything has the Linksys card.


--
Paul Amaranth | Rochester MI, USA
Aurora Group, Inc. | Systems & Software
paul@... | Unix / Windows / NT