[SLUG] Etherlink III card problem

[Peter Rundle <peter.rundle@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Sluggers,

Just inherited a 75Mhz pentium with 32Mb of Ram and an eitherlink III card
(3c509B). I put Mandrake 7.1 on it and, although it found the card at 
install after re-boot it loses the card. If I modprobe the 3c509 driver 
manually then stop and re-start networking it's happy again. Where should
I look to fix this?

Incidently I tried two Redhat distros' (6.0 and 6.2) 6.0 prompted for the 
driver and worked fine, 6.2 never prompted for a driver and completely 
failed to detect the card. However 6.2 can be fixed with a modprobe and 
network re-start. Hmmmm....

On another point, running X and netscape it runs like a dog! The Mandrake 
install (with gnome-sawmill) was unusable. I tried fvwm2 but it didn't seem
to make much difference. Redhat seemed slightly better and surprisingly I 
stuck E 0.16 on and it seems to be the best (though still woeful, it's 
swapping like crazy and I've shutdown every service I can think of).

So apart from adding more Ram, has anyone got any useful URL's etc that
help reduce the RAM requirements.

Cheers

Pete