[ale] Linksys cards supported?

[Ben Coleman]

On Sat, 29 Nov 1997 23:58:44 -0500, Geoffrey Myers wrote:

>I have the 'opportunity' to purchase a  LinkSys 'Network in a Box'
>package at a pretty good price.  Basically it contains two '32bit
>EtherPCI Lan Card II Adapters.'  I checked out the Ethernet-HOWTO to see
>if these cards were supported.  The HOWTO lists a couple of LinkSys
>cards but says there's too many to list them all.  Anyone know if these
>things will work with Linux?

Sometimes it pays to check out the vendor's web pages.  According the the
Linksys tech support pages(see
http://www.linksys.com/support/solution/nos/linux.htm), the EtherPCI II
LAN Card should work the with the NE2000 driver, but it requires a kernel
of 2.1.15 or higher.

You might want to note that the EtherPCI II cards don't do bus-mastering,
which to my mind loses part of the advantage of the PCI bus.  If you think
you'll be driving the network very hard, it might be something to think
about.  Note that the Linksys EtherPCI LAN cards(note no II) _do_ do
bus-mastering, and according to the Linksys tech support pages, should run
with the Tulip driver with kernel 1.3.57 or higher.

I do have one of the EtherPCI cards, but can't say how it runs under
Linux(that machine runs OS/2, and my Linux box is an old 386/25).  I found
them at Computer City about a month and a half ago for $60, and got Micro
Center to match the price for me.  You might be able to find better prices
via mail-order(my DatacommMall(http://www.datacommmall.com) catalog
appears to show the EtherPCI for $49, but you might want to double-check
and make sure that's not the II).

Ben
-- 
Ben Coleman NJ8J                     | The attempt to legislatively
Internet: bcoleman at mindspring.com    | micromanage equality results, at
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