Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 09:35:09 GMT From: dburr@POBoxes.com (Donald Burr) To: "Matt White" <mwhite@cmu.edu> Cc: mobile@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: PC Card Ether suggestions? Message-ID: <34e3c045.1136099@mail.inreach.com> In-Reply-To: <2487436744.887250699@PHOBOS.ADSL.NET.CMU.EDU> References: <2487436744.887250699@PHOBOS.ADSL.NET.CMU.EDU>
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[ followup moved to freebsd-mobile - this is a more appropritae place for this subject ] On Thu, 12 Feb 1998 02:31:39 -0500, you wrote: >So I have this laptop that I would like to run freebsd on so that I can do >some coding when I'm away on business. The problem is that the only ether >card I have for it is an SMC 8016T/PC, a card that is apparently supported >by nobody. > >This is not necessarily the end of the world since other ether cards exist. >What I would like are suggestions as to which PC Card ether adaptors work >well with freebsd. I would prefer a 10/100 card, but that is not a >requirement. I just purchased a Linksys Combo PCMCIA EthernetCard for $100 at Staples (yes, the office superstore). It runs beautifully on my Toshiba Satellite 105CS running FreeBSD 2.2.5 + PAO, and I am extremely happy with it. It's a fully NE2000 compatible card and works beautifully with the "ed" driver. It has plugs for both 10Base2 (coax) and 10BaseT (twisted pair), which is nice when you need to plug in but don't know what kind of wiring is available (I travel to clients' businesses a lot). Both plugs are built in to the same connector, so you don't need to carry around two separate connectors. The connector block is also extremely small and lightweight. The card and connector are both extremely rugged -- they look very well constructed, and the parts aren't flimsy, etc. The only problem is that the newer Linksys cards have a slightly different CIS identifier (a code that the card sends to the computer to tell the OS what kind of card it is). Current version of FreeBSD (with or without the PAO patches) don't have a proper pccard.conf entry to recognize this CIS identifier. This means that, for example, if you want to install FreeBSD off of the network using the PAO boot disk, you can't do this (since the card won't be recognized). (I got around this by buying a "LapLink" cable and installing FreeBSD using the PLIP [parallel line IP] protocol). However, once you get FreeBSD up and running, it is an extremely easy and trivial matter to correct the pccard.conf entry and get this card recognized. This is, alas, only a 10Mbps card, but it is still definitely worth considering. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-mobile" in the body of the message
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