Hi Simon, > I've just installed Freedos on my old pc, now I want to add add an > ethernet card. Its also an old one think its by realtek.
Then it is probably the classic RTL8029 (10mbit) or RTL8139 (100mbit) chipset. It should be possible to use generic NE2000 / NE2k drivers with those, but it is often better to use drivers for Realtek cards. > Is there a way of finding out what it is from within FREEDOS, which dos > drivers I will need and how to install it and get it working form my > home LAN? To find out which packet driver you need, you can use PCISLEEP (if it is not part of your FreeDOS install, just search the web) to get a list of PCI / AGP / PCIe / onboard-PCI devices in your PC. Look at the devices in the "network" category. You can search the web for the device ID, but often you can already guess the type from the number. A nice lookup service is the PCI IDs page: http://pci-ids.ucw.cz/iii/?i=10ec8139 for example tells you that device 10ec:8139 is RTL-8139. The subsystem ID would show you which brand of RTL8139 based device you have, but this makes no difference for the choice of driver: All RTL8139 should work with the classic RTSPKT 100mbit driver which can be found in various collections like the Sioux one mentioned by Fabien. As Fabien said, the settings for your home LAN go into wattcp.cfg, but you can often get things working with a very simple wattcp.cfg which only says "use DHCP", more or less. There are explanations about which variables can be set and to which values inside the default wattcp.cfg file :-). > I don't want to have to reinstall Freedos just for the new hardware. No problem, you only have to replace the packet driver. But you are right, there is some batch file in the packet driver package which automatically selects a driver. You could try to use FDPKG to remove this package and install it again to automatically get some updated configuration after you change to new network hardware. Please ask Blair (blairdude at gmail.com) if you cannot find out how to trigger this automatic setup. No matter if it is you or Blair who found the answer, please tell on this list how it works as soon as you know :-). You can also use bootdisks like www.netbootdisk.com or the www.veder.com/nwdsk/ which contain a pile of packet drivers and some mechanism to automatically decide which driver is suitable for your hardware. After booting nwdsk or netboot- disk, you can look at the generated config and copy the relevant settings to your FreeDOS box :-). If you cannot find config in files, you can still do "mem /d /p" or use similar tools to find out which drivers got loaded :-). Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
