"Jordan" <jpaphp@kscable.com> writes:

> I'm very new to UNIX, and fiddling with drivers is beyond my skill-level.
> Can anyone recommend a stable 10/100 PCMCIA NIC that will automagically load - all I'd need is to
> give it the IP info?

When you say "PCMCIA", are you using the term generically, or
specifically? Strictly speaking, PCMCIA cards are 16 bit, while
CardBus cards are 32 bit (they both fit into CardBus slots, but
there's an extra bit of plastic on the tip of CardBus cards that
prevents them from being inserted into PCMCIA slots). Most Pentium and
above systems support CardBus, and if your system supports it, you
should greatly prefer CardBus cards over PCMCIA.

Now that the background is out of the way, if you can use CardBus,
I've found that the 3Com 3C575 card is automatically recognized by
NetBSD, performs very well (better than 7.8MB/sec in informal tests),
and is usually available quite cheaply on eBay. For PCMCIA, the 3C574
does okay (although throughput is *considerably* less - less than
2MB/sec), as does the 3C556 (which is also slower, but has a modem
integrated).

I've recently wondered whether the 3Com 3C656 (the CardBus version of
the 556) was supported in NetBSD, as there have been a few on eBay,
but don't feel like buying one just to find out (I don't really need
another card, I'm just curious! ;-) Anybody know?