by
with a SMC EtherEZ network card. I have the machine set up to boot
either Win95 or Linux, and I was finally able to get both OS's to
activate the EtherEZ card at boot. If there are others who are
interested in doing something similar, I've put together some web pages
describing what I did:
http://members.home.net/djl56/linux_at_home_with_etherez/
I should note that I run Red Hat 5.1. Basically the steps were
1. Keep the card PnP enabled so that Win95 doesn't have any trouble with
it.
2. Use isapnp to configure the card on the Linux side, using the same
parameter values that Win95 uses.
3. Use SMC's EZStart tool to set the card's addressing mode to
memory-mapped, supposedly the way to enable compatibility with an Ultra
driver.
(If someone would care to comment on this, I'd be interested in hearing
it. The Ethernet HOWTO just says to set the card for Ultra compatible
mode, but the only thing I could find in the SMC docs about that was an
instruction to use memory-mapped mode to allow the EtherEZ to be used
with an Ultra driver. Then the Ethernet HOWTO goes on to say that the
card could be used with a newer Ultra driver in either "programmed i/o"
mode or "shared memory" mode. Which is different terminology than SMC's
"i/o mapped" and "memory-mapped" modes, but I assume the respective
terms mean the same thing. If that's the case, then what does it mean
to set "Ultra compatible" mode? Anyway, that's just a curiosity for me
- everything works fine and I'm leery of messing it up while
experimenting further.)
4. Load the SMC Ultra driver.
I realize this is an answer in search of a question, but I hope someone
will find it useful. It was certainly a learning experience for me.
(I've also "announced" this on the athome.users-unix newsgroup.)
- David Lamich