Hooo boy! PC Hardware is more difficult than I thought. Jumpers, IRQ's, COM
ports, conflicts! I need a serious PC education. I've been through a bunch of
hardware related web sites, but I don't really know where to start to get
answers to some (any) of my questions.
Here's my really long post: First, Thanks to those that responded to my first
inquiries about this. The information has been helpful and useful. I found
out that my ISA plug n play ethernet cards don't respond to the isapnp or
pnpdump commands: no cards found. I went to the pnpdump web page, and there
is a blurb on this, but none of the solutions were too helpful there, even
the one about the "no cards found" issue.
So, I then went on a hunt for information on the motherboard, which has an
AMI BIOS, though the motherboard itself was made by a company called PC
Chips. The reason I was researching the M/B was because I don't know how the
IRQ's COM's are set up (or exactly how it matters -- remember, I've never
played with PC hardware before, I've only ever had Macs), and I thought I
could get a picture of this particular M/B. I couldn't find one, nor could I
find any real info on it, either. It's got a 7 slot ISA bus, with an IDE
controller card taking one of the slots.
I checked the hardware-HOWTO, and looked at the Ethernet-HOWTO, but these
both assume I have access to the kernel source, but the Debian CD I've got
doesn't include it on that particular one. (It's on another, but I don't have
it! ) I looked at the "Biggest archive of Motherboards on the net" and they
didn't have any information on my particular problem...
Then, after all that, I thought I would just attempt to get some basic
information on COM and IRQ, but I don't know where to start. I don't want to
spend another $20-$40 on " a great book by O'Reilly," that's for sure.
All this for a firewall. Of course, I need to know about x86 hardware anyway,
since it dominates the world! :-) So, anyone can point me in the right
direction? I hope this isn't too off topic.........
Russell
On Friday 20 July 2001 08:09, you wrote:
> On Thu, 19 Jul 2001, Russell Hires wrote:
> > But first things first: how do _I_ recognize the cards? They look pretty
> > generic to me. One says (on the chip itself): NE2000 Compatible Plug &
> > Play (PnP). The other says nothing of the sort. It's got "LAN" --
> > apparently from Texas Instruments on the chip. The other chip says
> > Olicom...
> >
> > And so my journey goes, trying to figure out the world of the x86!
> >
> > Russell
>
> Hehe.. figuring out old hardware is fun =)
> hehe.. no really.. the way I usually get it is I just start searching for
> anything name, number, first part of numbers... pretty much anything on a
> chip or the card.. just drop it in google and pray you find a picture of
> your card or a reasonable description.. I've actually had some pretty good
> luck doing this..
>
> Jason
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