[TAG] 3C509B Does Not Work With Linux -- Problem Solved!

[Chris Gianakopoulos]

Hi Gang,

I'm just sharing an experience with you.  I've got Pentium 2 computers 
with onboard audio these days.

I installed Linux using SuSE 8.2, and the ethernet would work sometimes 
but mostly, the card did not get recognized.  The card is a 3C509B ISA 
card.  At first, I thought that I zapped the ISA slot in my motherboards 
(yea -- two of them) because the card would work on my trusty Pentium 
Pro computer.

What was interesting was that if I installed Windows 2000 in the Pentium 
2 system, the NIC worked flawlessly!  Okay, now I knew that it was not 
hardware.  I just gave up for a while.

During the holidays (December), I reinstalled Linux on the Pentium 2 
system.  This time, I decided to get the thing to work.  Playing around 
with the PNP tools, I saw that candidate resources for my onboard audio 
(MPU-401 to be specific) was either 0x300 or 0x330.  Looking at 
/proc/ioports, I saw that 0x300 was chosen for the I/O port.

I rebooted the system and disabled the onboard audio via the BIOS setup. 
  Of course, my Ethernet then worked.  Looking at /proc/ioports, I asw 
that 0x300 (my favorite addresses of course) was allocated to the NIC.

I went ahead and reenabled the onboard audio, thus causing failure of 
the Ethernet again.  I used YaST (SuSE's setup tool), and manually 
allocated 0x330 to the MPU-401 port, and the Ethernet worked flawlessly. 
  Problem solved!

This was my first exposure to plug and play hardware when using Linux. 
Plug and play was disabled on the 3C509 as recomended in the older days, 
and the audio hardware was allocated my sacred I/O address.  As I can 
see /proc has lots of useful stuff, but, this is the first time that I 
had to use it to troubleshoot a problem.  Cool and fun.

Regards,
Chris G.

P.S.  I don't know if this is a two cent tip, but, it was a fun experience.