Topic: ISA Ethernet cards??

[John Powell]

Just wondering what the logic is behind
removing support for common ISA Ethernet
NICs?  I have happily been using 3C509s
for quite some time.  Core RH6.0 does
support these very common cards.

I certainly understand the benefits of PCI
cards,both in performance and simplicity,
but it seems a bit extreme to remove ISA
card support for such popular cards.

It is not a huge deal for me personally, as
it is probably time to get with the '90s and
all, and cards are relatively cheap.  But it
caught me off-guard as I am simply using
e-smith on a machine that was previously
using RH 6.0, so I ass-u-me-d that the
same cards were supported.  My bad move
for not reading the supported cards listing.

Any information as to why this was done
would be of interest....but for me, I guess
I am stopping by CompUSA on the way to
work ;(

Otherwise, this looks like a great product
filling an important niche!

TIA,

JP

[Kim]

Hi John,

Getting the system to recognize ISA devices is an error prone process, can introduce the danger of locking up the system and often requires fiddling.  That's why we only provide warrantied technical support to customers using PCI NICs.

However, lots of customers who have a Linux background have been able to use e-smith with ISA devices fairly simply.  You might want to do a search on this bboard as I believe others have posted solutions on this subject.

Best regards - I'm glad you like the product and hope you found a good cheap PCI card at CompUSA.

Kim

[Edward J Barr]

I am using the Netgear 10/100 card. Very cheap and works ok on e-smith and RH 5.2
Just choose the tulip chipset in RH. It gives better performance than the SMC
9432 on Netware 3.12 by the way and is about 1/3 of the price.