[ILUG] Followup 1: Naive ADSL/WiFi questions (long (sorry!))?

[Snowbat]

On Friday 17 August 2007 01:43, Brian Foster wrote:
>   | From: Timothy Murphy <tim at birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie>
>   | Date: Thu, 16 Aug 2007 18:06:10 +0100
>   |[ ... ]
>   | I never found an ethernet card that did _not_ work with Linux
>   |[ ... ]
>   | Incidentally, don't all computers nowadays have ethernet built-in?
>
>  I've no idea.  the issue here is two-fold:
>  1st, my computer is sufficiently old it does not
>      have a built-in Ethernet.
>  2nd, my Linux distro is sufficiently old that I'm
>      _guessing_ there are more “modern” NIC chipsets
>      it does not support.

I have a couple of RTL-8139C based cards here.  It may not be the most 
interrupt-efficient 10/100 chipset in the world but in my experience it works 
well and is reliable.  One of the cards is in a Pentium 200 MMX machine and 
was autodetected by Mandrake 9.1 (released March 2003, about a year before 
SUSE 9.1).