Hi,

> > Someone tried to use PCI ethernet cards for PC in a G3 tower mac?

> Ya..it is very possible...just make sure that the card comes with a driver
> for MacOS 9/X and it probably already has a driver which you can compile
> straight into your kernel in linux or just load as a module...I have an
> rtl8139 card in my beige G3 tower..ad it works fine.

Actually, the existence of drivers for MacOS only matters if you want to
use the card under MacOS. Otherwise, with the exception of a boot ROM or
an OpenFirmware ROM, there's nothing either "PC" specific or Mac specific
about an ethernet card.

There's a huge list of supported devices at:
http://www.netbsd.org/Hardware/pci.html

Note that most of the common ethernet cards have been tested, and the
cards listed in the GENERIC kernel config can be counted on to work:

fpa*    at pci? dev ? function ?        # DEC PCI FDDI (DEFPA) Controller
ep*     at pci? dev ? function ?        # 3Com 3c59x
epic*   at pci? dev ? function ?        # SMC EPIC/100 Ethernet
ex*     at pci? dev ? function ?        # 3Com 90x[BC]
fxp*    at pci? dev ? function ?        # Intel EtherExpress PRO 10+/100B
lmc*    at pci? dev ? function ?        # Lan Media Corp SSI/HSSI/DS3
ne*     at pci? dev ? function ?        # NE2000-compatible Ethernet
rtk*    at pci? dev ? function ?        # Realtek 8129/8139
sip*    at pci? dev ? function ?        # SiS 900/7016 Ethernet
tlp*    at pci? dev ? function ?        # DECchip 21x4x and clones

Others may work without problem; I'm using an Intel gigabit card (wm), and
everything except hardware checksumming works as-is.

If you're just looking for a cheap ethernet card for low to moderate
traffic, the RealTek 8139 cards can usually be found for around $10 USD.
If you want to use the machine for heavy network traffic (nfs, AppleTalk),
I recommend the 3com 3c905b or c, as they are more efficient and do
hardware checksumming, and aren't that expensive.

John Klos
Sixgirls Computing Labs