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From: Gardner Pomper on 7 Feb 2005 14:04
Hi,

I am new at this, so forgive me if this is a dumb question.

I just bought a Netgear GA511 gigabit cardbus ethernet card. On the Netgear
site, it says "supports all major operating systems". I don't find any
information on that site or the CDROM about Linux. They can't seriously be
saying that Linux *isn't* a major operating system, can they?

I have been searching the web and found
http://www.scyld.com/driver_updates.html, which seems like I should be able
to download cardbus drivers to help me along the way. I found a message
somewhere on the net that implied that the card is based on the Realteck
8169 chipset. Unfortunately, ftp.scyld.com always refuses my connection. I
don't know if it is down, since the acquisition by penguincomputing or just
busy or something else.

I am running 2.4.25-14_Scyldsmp. Can anyone suggest how I might get this
card working? Alternatively, I am willing to buy just about any gigabit
Cardbus card that works out of the box.

Thanks! If there is a decent book about this linux driver stuff, I would
appreciate it. I have been trying to get a Wifi card for linux off and on
for about 3 years and it just doesn't seem possible. I would really like to
see an explanation of why I have to rebuild the kernel every time I buy a
new piece of hardware.

Thanks for all the help,

- Gardner

From: fj40rockcrawler on 7 Feb 2005 14:34
I'm certainly no expert with Linux...so take all this with a grain of
salt..

Yes, Linux could be considered not a 'major' operating system. By
major, most companies selling a desktop-ish device like this can mean
Win2K/XP-home/XP-pro, MacOS. So yeah I've seen that where most don't
consider Linux a 'major' OS (which makes some sense, it's certainly not
'major' in the desktop/home-pc arena).

Now, the good news is the developers of Linux always seem to have a
chip on their shoulder and do what can't be done. So when a
manufacturer says it won't work with Linux, they say, wanna bet...so
with enough searching most networking devices can actually work, partly
because of the wild diversity of Linux developers and party because
many company's devices use the same chipset as another card from
another company, or similar enough to be used.

You have been trying for 3 years to get a wifi card to work?? Wow, I
have not set one up with a wifi card, but have many friends that have,
new out-of-the-box HP laptops, which Linux installed perfectly on and
even auto-detected all wifi components and everything, shockingly easy
actually is what they told me, so it certainly can be done, but might
require finding what the chipset is for the wifi adapter you're wanting
to use and see what module that takes.

Good Luck!

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