[ILUG] network card installation help needed

[Vincent Cunniffe]

>Lads, I need a bit of help here. I have until tomorrow morning to install
>a 3Com Etherlink XL PCI network card on my Suse 6.0  box, and not a clue
>as to how to go about doing it. Anyone got any hints, tips, or can just
>tell me what the hell to do? Any help will be much appreciated.

Put card in box. Find chipset of card. Find which driver module 
supports that chipset (usually by reading the entries in the kernel
recompile menus, which tend to list chipsets).

Recompile kernel, including the card as a module.

Have a look at modules.conf, which might now contain an entry
for the module with IRQ and IO arguments. If the card is one of
those with jumpers (I think it's one of the Plug'n'Pray ones though)
then make sure that the values are correct.

Restart the machine.

Err... that should be it. Make sure you have networking, etc., all
turned on in your kernel also.

Run ifconfig to make sure you have the card working OK. If so,
there'll be an entry for it : you can config the interface manually
or with linuxconf or similar. If it's not there, then cat /proc/ioports
,/proc/pci and /proc/interrupts to find out if your card has been
detected and if so what resources it's using.

Make sure routing for the new interface is correct (i.e. everything
non-local should now be routed out through the card), and try 
pinging something else visible on the network. If you're testing 
from a linux box to Windows machines, then it's simpler to try
pinging the linux box from the windows ones rather than vice versa.

The annoying thing about linux is that you only ever seem to have to
do this once. A really well designed operating system such as
Windows allows the user constant practice at configuring hardware
and software, which is an area in which I think Linux still has a 
considerable way to catch up. It's is frustrating to find that you need
to remember such details only to realise that you last performed this
operation a year ago, and the cat has eaten your man pages.

Good luck...

Vin