[PLUG] NIC driver installation howto? (newbieish level help needed)

["kaze" <kaze@voicenet.com>]

In building Red Hat 9.x GNU/Linux boxes I ran out of NIC cards that are
supported 'out of the box.'

Using static IPs (server boxes) and when I do an ifconfig eth0 everything
looks right, and I can ping myself (I guess the loopback interface works
fine, right?) but can't be pinged or ping the router or other boxes on the
subnet. The lights on the NIC all blink on and off together slowly.

The first NIC was a LNE-100TX (I have two of these.) On
http://www.linksys.com/download/driver.asp?dlid=2&osid=7 I matched my card
to the one labeled "LINKSYS is printed on card's CPU chip" and updated
"10/98" and downloaded the two floppies. Google lead me to some pages saying
to use the drivers off disk two, but the closest thing I see is SCOUNIX...

Instead of wasting more time on that I tried a 3c905B card.
http://support.3com.com/infodeli/tools/nic/linuxdownload.htm has the file
3c90x-1.0.0i.tar.gz for download and a nice readme.txt and install.txt, all
labeled as good for Red Hat 6.1 and Kernel Version 2.2.12-20. The installer
./install3c90x didn't work, so I tried Building a loadable module Driver by
using the batch 3COM provided, compile_UP. This kicked back too many errors.

Is there a generic driver I can use? Is there a better resource for current
less-pain-to-get-it-to-work NIC drivers? Any good detailed HOWTOs on this
stuff? Seems like a basic thing people would have to do to make a machine
useful - but I don't see much clear documentation on it.

- Zake

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