[buug] Re: ethernet config problems

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Jerry Cheung (jrcow97 at yahoo.com):

> Hey everyone, I got the dos 3C5X9cfg.exe and ran it to
> collect more stats about the card.  In fact, the card
> is older than I thought (still in good condition
> though)
> 
> The information I collected was 
> 3Com 3c509 TPO EtherLink III 16-bit ISA NIC
> NIC type - TP-Only
> Manufactured - 4-25-1990 :)
> I/O base address - 300H
> Interrupt - 10
> 
> ...sorry, but it turns out it's not PnP...

<sigh>

So, wait:  What's the symptom you're encoutering, again?  You were
saying that one distribution automatically found the card and another
didn't, or what?  I'm unclear, now, on the nature of your problem.

[Rick consults the list archive's back messages.]

OK, you're doing Slackware 8.0.  Your initial message said you needed 
help with Linux isapnptools, which is why we ended up going on a wild
goose chase.

This should illustrate for you the reason why you, the person seeking
help, should always take care not to overdefine your problem.  You 
_should_ have just told us the symptom, what you did to address it,
what the machine did when you tried that, and asked for any suggestions.
_Instead_, you posted a (wrong) guess as to the area your problem lay
in, and asked for help chasing down your theory.

Now, can you see why that was a bad idea?  None of that activity
actually helped you. 

Possibly useful to you in the future:
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

You said:

> I need some instructions about how to get the card detected at boot
> and usable.

Obvious question:  What's telling you that the card isn't detected?
What happens when you do "/sbin/ifconfig -a"?

Are you familiar enough with setup of ISA cards that you're not
encountering an IRQ or I/O base address conflict at the hardware
level?  You can check that by running the "test" routine in the
3C5X9CFG.EXE utility.  Everything but the "echo" test (which requires a
special cable setup) should test OK.  If it doesn't, you probably have
another device trying to grab the same IRQ and/or I/O base address, and
should adjust the 3Com card's settings to eliminate the conflict.

But _if_ you've used the 3Com card using the same hardware settings 
on a different Linux distribution, without problems, then that
hardware-resource conflict seems unlikely.

-- 
Cheers,   "Why is the alphabet in that order?  Is it because of that song?"
Rick Moen                                              -- Steven Wright
rick at linuxmafia.com