Date: Mon, 06 Jul 1998 15:36:30 +0100 From: Matthias Paul Subject: Re: NE2000 PCI NICs To: opendos AT delorie DOT com Reply-to: Matthias DOT Paul AT post DOT rwth-aachen DOT de Message-id: <3EC102E55DD@reze-1.rz.rwth-aachen.de> Organization: Rechenzentrum RWTH Aachen Precedence: bulk On Mon, 06 Jul 1998 Mark Aitchison wrote: > Newer NE2000 clones that are PNP PCI cards are significantly different > to old NE2000 cards; I found this a problem for Linux lat last year too > (now solved). Yes, at least the PCI cards are so different from the standard NE2000 cards for ISA, that they can hardly be called NE2000 clones (they are still named NE2000 compatible merely for marketing reasons). Even if you can figure out PnP settings, for PCI you still need MLID drivers specifically for your NIC. That is, the generic NE2000 driver, that ships with PNW and most othe networking software does not work. So, if one doesn t have a driver disk for the card, s/he has almost lost the game. Fortunately, in our case with PNW, if you *have* the corresponding driver disk, in most cases you will find the proper driver on it (just look for MLID, or ODI, or NetWare 3.12+). The bottom line is, that I cannot recomment any "NE2000" PCI clones at all, especially if you re running more than one OS. Either use NE2000 ISA clones, which is a well defined standard and fast enough for older machines. You can use them with any networking software. Or, on PCI machines, use other widespread cards like 3com s 3c90x NICs, which occupy similar low resources as the good old I/O driven NE2000. Especially for DOS users, I cannot recomment to use cards which use memory-mapped I/O (that is the communication with the card goes through RAM windows in the CPU s normal address room), as they often cause trouble with EMM386 and you d loose rare address room for DOS programs to load them high (EMM386 /EXCLUDE). Matthias -------------------------------------------------------------------- Matthias Paul, Ubierstrasse 28, D-50321 Bruehl, GERMANY eMail: Web : http://www.rhrz.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html -------------------------------------------------------------------- Caldera Digital Research Systems/OpenLinux: http://www.caldera.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------