[ILUG] intel pro 10 isa card

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Kelly (longword at esatclear.ie):

> ISA is fun these days. Unless the cards are PnP, and you're sure
> they're in PnP mode (personally I prefer non-PnP), make sure the IRQ
> they use is marked as "Legacy/ISA" in your PnP system BIOS. Otherwise
> the motherboard may not bother connecting that IRQ line to the ISA
> bus.
> 
> Next best tactic is to play with the "Boot to PnP OS" system BIOS
> option.

Yep.

Nils, the problem with ISA cards is that you either have personally to
assume responsbility making sure hardware resources are assigned
correctly (see:  http://linuxmafia.com/pub/hardware/chart.txt), use 
ISA Plug'n'Pray -- which never really worked properly, and which is a 
kludge in Linux -- or arrive at some compromise between the two.

The "Legacy/ISA" motherboard BIOS settings Paul refers to is a pool of 
hardware resources (IRQs, I/O base addresses) roped off from access by
both PCI and ISA PnP cards, and thus available for non-PnP ISA cards
that have been hardware-level configured to use them.  In which case,
you get to know the cards' jumpers and configuration utilities really 
well.

So, if you want to keep life simple, stick to PCI/AGP cards.  If you 
insist on using ISA ones, be prepared to _either_ contend with
"Legacy/ISA" resource pools, jumpers, and card-configuration utilities
_or_ get knee-deep in Linux's ISA PnP userspace utilities (if your ISA
cards are all PnP-capable, and have that mode enabled).

On the latter subject:
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Plug-and-Play-HOWTO.html

-- 
Cheers,
Rick Moen                      "vi is my shepherd; I shall not font."
rick at linuxmafia.com                               -- Psalm 0.1 beta