[ale] ethernet problems II

[Eric Z. Ayers]

Turning off PnP didn't necesarilly do it for me.  My motherboard doesn't even
have a PnP  bios, but I had a problem with my plug and play sound card.
If you have another card that uses I/O port 0x100, (or a range above
0x100), the 3c509 ethernet probe will fail.    

What I noticed was that when my SoundBlaster 16PnP was installed, my
ethernet card wouldn't work under linux.  No message for the ethernet
card at all on the bootup sequence, no matter how I set the IRQ and IO
port of the 3c509 card.  Everything worked OK under win 95.  When I
pulled out the sound blaster, w/o changing anything else, the ethernet
card worked. 

My solution:  Get the pnp extensions from red hat web site (pointer to
this page off of http://www.cc.gatech.edu/linux/ldp/)  Compile the 3c5x9
ethernet driver as a module.  Machine boots, runs the 'isapnp' to
configure the sound blaster and disable the stereo enhancer device,
previously located at 0x100.  Then run 'insmod 3c509' from the startup
script (warns about autodetection as a module on non-EISA machine, but
I haven't had a problem with that.)

-Eric.

Eric Jones writes:
 > In response to my earlier question...I have already turned off PnP. The 
 > 3C509 does not get recognized at boot time. Will upgrading to 2.+ do the 
 > trick in the computer seeing the ethernet card?
 > 
 > Thanks