I think you became a victim of your own experience. I noticed this by myself: every time I started thinking that I am a "guru", something happens that lows my "hutzpa", e.g. I can't install some Intel NIC in W95. Finally I managed to solve almost everything but the hints keep coming.
I think this comes from the sky.
Let me suggest some easy solution: I have a spare COM 3C509 ISA NIC which known as relatively effortless to configure under Linux. I can exchange it to Intel.
P.S. I also had Spectrum ZX 32k Sinclair machine with tape recorder and Basic in EPROM. I assembled it myself at home in 1990.
I decided to **steal** a noname PCI ethernet card from one of my other
machines and try it instead of the INTEL ISA card. On booting, Mandrake
discovered the card and correctly configured it (just as in WIN98 where
it's recognized as RealTek). I was asked if I wanted to setup
networking and I answered **YES**. To make a long story short, on three
attempts, the configuration prograam locked up the computer. I finally
decided to edit the configuration files manually and discovered that
apparently the configuration program was not smart enough to know what
to do with the old IRQ and IO settings and this was crashing the
machine.
So I got everything setup (at least I thought), but when I try to PING
192.168.0.1 (which is how I set up the machine), I still get Network is
unreachable. This is really frustrating.
===========================================================
= Evgeny Popov ===================== [EMAIL PROTECTED] =
= Water Management SCADA Centers Developer =
= ELECTRICAL & MECHANICAL SERVICES =
= SUBSIDIARY OF MEKOROT WATER CO.LTD =
