[plug] RealTek network cards and bagging MS

[Leon Brooks]

Trevor Phillips wrote:
> moir at iinet.net.au wrote:
>> I wouldnt really purely bag windows for this, the realtek cards are pretty
>> crummy at the best of times

> *shrug*
> Since installing a Non-Microsoft driver, I've had no problems at all. And no
> problems under Linux, either...

Your mileage varies from card to card and with different motherboards.
The RealTek are a little marginal (and read the comments in the driver
source), but if they work they generally keep right on working. I much
prefer the tulip-based cards as they're notably more efficient and
generally less marginal.

As to bagging MS, time and time again I've made devices work fine under
Linux, first try, forever and sometimes entirely automatically (a PCMCIA
modem), no user intervention required at all - and the same device
either won't work under Windows (on the same machine), or works for a
while and stops for no reason, or works sometimes, or (more often) does
something bizarre like loading multiple drivers and/or allocating
conflicting plug-and-prang resources.

In one recent head-butt saga, Windows 98 would not install a TCP/IP
protocol stack - I'd click on protocol, add-button, select Microsoft
("ahhh...", I hear the experienced say, "there's your error...") and
TCP/IP; it would clear the protocol window, and about three seconds
later it would flinch and deselect the "add" button - but no TCP/IP was
added. Adding and deleting IPX and NetBEUI worked fine (except that
NetBEUI didn't work; I have no way of testing IPX at that site). I
passed the buck back to the supplier, who farted around and eventually,
I'm told, reinstalled Windows 98 to make it work.

On the other hand, I've seen crashy Windows machines that still crash
regularly under Linux, although I'm happy to say it's often during
kernel initialisation, so there's absolutely no doubt about the problem
being hardware. The rest give you segfaults (sig 11) all the time, and
sometimes something as simple as re-seating or rearranging the memory
SIMMs fixes it.