[RULE] Fw: Re: freesco and old network cards

[Richard Kweskin]

Hello All

This is the dialogue:
> Begin forwarded message:

> On Wed, 2004-03-17 at 23:04, Richard Kweskin wrote:
> Hello
> 
> As a member of the RULE list I saw your last post about freesco. Does this distro recognise your old cards without any input from you? My only experience has been with manual invoking the module and having to give the i/o address while using the RedHat kernels.
> 
> Richard

Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 01:37:56 +1100
From: drose <drose at dtlm.homelinux.net>
To: Richard Kweskin <rkwesk at hellug.gr>
Subject: Re: freesco and old network cards


0.27 didn't detect the way the current version does, at least not so far
as I remember.

Freesco 0.3.2 uses 2.0.39 kernel, slackware. 

0.3.2 has a lot of the code written by Donald Becker.  I ended up
finding Donald at the end of google searches for "ISA detect linux" and
such before I realised that he was a major contributor and probably
still is.

His reply is partially given here:

"[An environment to detect ISA cards] is basically just building a 2.2
or earlier kernel that includes all of the drivers I wrote.  The only
missing piece is producing a report of the devices, and
the resource they use.  The only place this was presented was the kernel
detection message."

I hope he doesn't mind, I can't see why he would.

To be honest, this seems to be a problem with Linux, and perhaps open
source in general -- where do we find the corporate memory?  Projects
fold, people move on, unless you know the names of the people involved
and hope they've got some dusty CDs lying around,  where do you get old,
now unused code?

Red Hat dumped the legacy ISA support becuase ISA PnP changed a lot of
problems and PCI eliminated the whole need for detection routines like
Donald's.  I do NOT have the expertees to build a 2.2 or older kernel
with the drivers built in.
 
So where's the old Red Hat Distros? not on RH's FTP servers, they just
have empty directories titled with older version numbers.

Someone somewhere in a Uni knows all about this stuff and could say 

"Oh yes, I know what you mean -- use this CD, it supports all the ISA
cards I've ever seen, 8-inch floppies and MFM/RLL controllers too! Kepp
that one, I've got plenty."

On a final note, my 3c509 will ONLY be detected if there's a cable
connected and an active link -- so keep that in mind....

I've unsubscribed from Rule so you might feel like passing this on.

Cheers!


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