[vortex] Dell Latitude C500

[Gavin Tabor]

Dear All,

I have recently bought a Dell Latitude 500 laptop, with the modem/3Com
10/100MBit miniPCI ethernet card in it. I am trying to set it up under
Linux, using SuSE 7.1 distribution, and the one part I can't get working
is the ethernet link to our departmental LAN (100MBit connection).

After some rummaging, I came to the conclusion that the device is a
3c556 card (device id 6055). I came across the web page at

http://www2.neweb.ne.jp/wd/fbm/3c556/ethernet.html

which gave me some advice : I am running kernel 2.2.18, which I believe
supports this device with a driver 3c59x, which appears on the system.
I have attempted to access it, placing the line "alias eth0 3c59x" in
modules.conf. However the system still does not seem to recognise the
device, and when I try to ping a neighbouring machine I get "network
is unreachable", which I take to mean that the system is not accessing
the card correctly. The card does work BTW : I have it working under
Windows 2000 (ugh).

If anyone can suggest what I might be doing wrong, I would really value
some suggestions. Pardon such a simple query - I've looked through the
archive for this list before posting, and it all seems well beyond me
 - but I'm a real newbie with Linux.

Thanks in advance.

Gavin

-- 

Dr. Gavin Tabor
School of Engineering and Computer Science
Department of Engineering
University of Exeter