3c59x on Dell OptiPlex motherboard, and 3c900 driver

Jason L Tibbitts III (tibbs@hpc.uh.edu)
07 Jan 1997 22:40:54 -0600

I've been given the task of installing Linux on a Dell OptiPlex GXPro,
which is a reasonably nice PPro machine. It has a 3c590 on the
motherboard, to which it assigns IRQ 11. The machine also has an Adaptec
2940UW SCSI card in it, to which the BIOS assigns (you guessed it) IRQ 11.
Attempting to ifconfig eth0 gives the expected "Try again."

I've checked the Vortex web page which tells me to move the Ethernet card
to a different slot. Oops, it's on the motherboard. The cheezy Dell BIOS
doesn't allow you to do any IRQ assignment. (That's what you get for your
$5K. My advice is to buy basically anything else.) The 2940 driver
purports to support IRQ sharing and the Vortex page seems to blame the
problem on SCSI drivers that don't, so I'm at somewhat of a loss.

While I'm at it, has anyone had any experience with the 3c900 support in
the new vortex driver? I need to get Linux up with one of those, too.

Any ideas? Thanks,

-- 
      Jason L. Tibbitts III - tibbs@uh.edu - 713/743-8684 - 221SR1
System Manager:  University of Houston High Performance Computing Center
                1994 PC800 "Kuroneko"      DoD# 1723