LinkSys EtherFast 10/100 LAN Card

[David Rose]

David Rose writes:
> I spent half an hour pulling boards out of my machine before I
> remembered I'd disabled the OS Plug-and-Play support through the BIOS.
> (I'd had to do this some time back because of a limited SCSI driver
> that couldn't tolerate the card's IRQ moving around from time to time.
> I've now found a better workaround, by disabling Plug-and-Play just on
> the SCSI card.)
> 
> When I turned Plug-and-Play back on, the card came up on IRQ 3 this
> time, and works like a champ.  (I haven't measured the performance
> yet, but here I am talking through it at least.)

Addendum:

It turned out that enabling OS support of PnP didn't solve the problem
altogether; it only postponed it.  As soon as I'd added back in my
modem card (which wanted--you guessed it--IRQ3), the LinkSys card
went back to its old favorite, IRQ9, and stopped working again.
Removing the modem card again didn't help; the LinkSys card had
somehow decided it was happy at IRQ9 and wanted to stay there.

It seems that my graphics adaptor card also wants to use IRQ9.  Under
Windows, the two can share the interrupt happily, but not so for some
reason in Linux.  Perhaps this is because of some problem with the
graphics adaptor drivers?  I know that my graphics support in Linux is
far from complete, but it seems strange that this should have such a
catastrophic effect on the IRQ sharing.

In any case, I couldn't find any way to force either the LinkSys card
or the graphics adaptor not to choose IRQ9.  I took the damn card
back to the store today.  I was better off with my old hard-jumpered
ISA adaptor.

David