[plug] New Netgear FA310TX cards

[Matt Kemner]

Morning All

Has anybody managed to get one of the recent Netgear FA310TX cards to
work?

It appears they've changed the chipset on them yet again.  The main
noticeable difference is the main chipset (which used to be a "digital"
tulip chip) is now marked LC82C169C, where the older ones are marked
NGMC169B.

I have tried the tulip.c that comes standard in both 2.0.36 and 2.2.7, as
well as the tulip.c netgear provide on the disk, and the latest tulip.c
found on Donald Becker's site. They all show the same problem, which is of
huge packet loss.

Since Netgear provide a modified version of tulip.c on their disk, with a
techinical support email contact, I figured a detailed email to them would
mean the problem would be fixed quickly.

I have since received 3 emails from them.

The first told me to download the updated drivers from their site - the
Linux driver is in a self-extracting .exe file along with the rest of
their drivers, so I had to find a windoze box to extract it (unzip didn't
work) only to find the driver was identical to the one on the floppy.

When I replied they told me to go look at Donald Becker's site.
When I told them his latest driver didn't work either, and did they
actually support Linux, they told me they don't support Linux, but that
the card works with Linux, and by the way have I seen this site? (and
pointed me back at Donald Becker's site)

I'm sure Donald Becker will fix it eventually - after all we went through
the same thing when Netgear first changed from the authentic tulip chipset
to their clone.  I'm just disappointed because they list Linux on the box
as a supported operating system, but they don't even have a Linux machine
to test new chipsets on.

 - Matt