*BSD News Article 98886


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From: Andrew Gordon <andrew.gordon@arg1.demon.co.uk>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Availability of *non* PnP ethernet card
Date: Tue, 01 Jul 1997 19:25:09 +0100
Message-ID: <33B94B85.167EB0E7@arg1.demon.co.uk>
References: <86pvt3m6ml.fsf@kiste-5.ki.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de> <5pb0tg$6em@news.gvsu.edu>
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Matt Behrens wrote:
> 
> Marko Schuetz (marko@kiste-5.ki.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de) wrote:
> : I am looking for a cheap ethernet card for my desktop
> : PC. Unfortunately, it seems all that is offered these days are PnP
> : ethernet cards. I assume I cannot use these with FreeBSD, set IRQ,
> : memory base etc. Does anyone of a place selling inexpensive ethernet
> : cards that have good old jumpers on them?
> 
> You can actually use PnP ISA cards with FreeBSD.  Simply get the PnP
> package from the xperimnt directory in the distribution and compile it
> into your kernel.  Admittedly, it's not automatic, but that's no big deal.
>

Note also that most motherboards these days have PnP BIOS support,
so they will initialise all the PnP cards to some address or other -
you just have to guess what address that is!

Your guessing can be simplified by using the 'pnpinfo' program
from the above mentioned package, which will print out the
'preferred' settings from the ROM on the card.  pnpinfo is a
stand-alone program that does not require re-compilation of the
kernel.