Hi all, after a year or so hiatus off from the last debacle of a Linux attempt, I have decided to give Linux another go. Old machine (P180/64MB RAM/2GB drive) that actually installed Debian smoothly this time. Got X running first try and everthing. I have three ISA NICS. An Intel FA82595, an SMC 83C690L and a NetgearEA201. None of these NIC's get recognized by the O/S and none will install. I actually found a driver for the Netgear card and got as far as extraction in DOS to the floppy. The readme then states- 1. Login to the network as root. (On maintenance mode) 2. Insert the driver diskette in Drive A and use the "doscp" command to copy the SCOUNIX Driver into the UNIX directory. For example: # cd / # doscp a:/scounix/setup setup (or # doscp b:/scounix/setup setup) # chmod +x /setup # ./setup a:/scounix (or # ./setup b:/scounix) Well doscp is not a valid command and i'll be darned if I can find any way to make it, or any of the others work. In fact I have scoured the WWW for two days on how to install a NIC driver under Linux and there simply is no 1-2-3 tutorial that I can find. Seems that if it is not recognized during the inital set-up you are SOL. Even going back to dpkg-reconfigure (insert package here, I have not found an applicable one yet) there is no way to tell it to look at the floppy. In fact isn't the filesystem completely different anyway? How could this ever work?? Any ideas out there on how to do this? Please don't say go buy a PCI NIC. These things will all work all the way back to WIN 3.11 so Linux MUST be able to use them somehow. Jimi_l

Are all the network utilities that came with Debian installed? I know red hat found my 3Com ISA card.. it auto-detects it abit like Plug and Play during system startup. Not sure about Debian though Ben, Pentium 4 1.7GHz, 512 LB Cache 512 DDR RAM PC2700 ATI Radeon 9200SE 128 DDR RAM Western Digital 80GB 7200 RPM

Do you know the NIC's I/O address and IRQ settings? If not, oftentimes these older NICs came with DOS utilities to set them. Boot the machine with a DOS boot diskette and run that utility, either to merely look at the settings or to modify them. Keep in mind that I've never used Debian, but in the various flavors of Linux that I've used, assuming the ISA NIC is NE2000 compatible, all I did was add these 2 lines to the /etc/modules.conf file (used to be conf.modules): alias eth0 ne options ne io=0x340 irq=11 (above example has NIC i/o address of 340 and irq of 11) Then, you can use "ifconfig" to set up the interface. "man ifconfig" for further info. Good luck.