[wellylug] NIC solved

[Peter Lambrechtsen]

On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 11:10 AM, E Chalaron <e.chalaron at xtra.co.nz> wrote:
> I can't believe it.....
> In last hope I got a realtek GB out of a windows machine, the card has a
> different layout from probably more recent ones (larger etc...), still
> the r8169 is on it.
> Guess what .... it works out of the (old windows) box...
>
> So it seems that not all realtek cards are the same despite the same
> chipset on it.
> Note that both types are working without troubles under Windows.
> Anyway, I would probably not have had the same feedback on a windows
> mailing list either :-)

That doesn't suprise me at all, what are the LSPCI Vendor id's between
the two cards, I would suspect a bit of googling around would show you
that certain ID's work ok, and others don't. I always remember having
nothing but trouble with the realtek cards on Linux, but then again I
have always used the Suse distro of some flavor or another.  So I do
know the pain.  One of the common problems I had was when the kernel
had a built in driver, that you had to disable before you could load a
module.  This was a trick that was common with sles 9.  No so much in
sles 10.

Plus for the realtek from memory there are two different forks of the
driver from two different teams... one driver worked well with some
model of cards and the other worked well with other models of cards
(the pain from 3-4 years ago still lingers in the deep recesses of my
memory!).