I'm making the assumption that you have

1. Either another computer running Linux or

2. Your current pc runs Windows as well for the purpose of downloading the necessary driver.

First off, I want to congratulate you on buying an ethernet card made by a company that offers excellent Linux support. If you have the documentation and disks, you have everything you need. If not, then you soon will. There are, as of this writing, 193 posts with the word Linksys in them. I have read them all, and can tell you the main people who have a problem are those using Red Hat Linux 6.1. This NHF should be especially helpful to you.

The first step is to make sure you have the correct version of Tulip driver. Linksys is very picky about this.

go to your net directory

cd /usr/src/linux-VERSION/drivers/net

Replace VERSION with your version number.

1. In this directory you should find the file "tulip.c". Open it with your favorite word processor and look for a line near the top saying:

static const char version[] = "tulip.c:v0.91g-ppc 7/16/99 becker@cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov\n";

You are looking for the iversion number v0.91g-ppc. That is the version I have, and my card works. I can tell you that v0.89 does not work. If you compile the wrong version you will get an error like this:

Device or resource busy.

or this

[ -f /usr/include/linux/modversions.h ] && echo -DMODVERSIONS ' No such file or directory

2. get the driver

You can find this driver in two places; either disk 2, which came with the ethernet card, or on the internet at www.linksys.com. I won't give the exact location on their site, because they just rebuilt it and I'm not sure how permanent that address would be.

3. Get that driver off the disk. Mount the disk using the command

su -c "mount -t msdos /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy"

This will ask for your root password in order to mount the floppy. su -c is a quick way to jump into su without staying logged in. If you want, you can just log into root in the first place and run the above command either with or without the quotes.

If you can't get the driver off the disk, you must download it from the http://www.linksys.com website. For this you will need an internet connection. Below is the command for mounting your Windows drive if that's your only (not recommended) way to download it.

su -c "mount -t msdos /dev/hdc8 /mnt"

which mounts my entire Windows hard drive on /mnt.

Wherever you get the file from, put it in a Linux directory to work on. I created one called /home/tim/tulip where I did my compiling.

NOTE FOR THOSE USING WINDOWS: this is the warning on the Linksys download site:
If You Are Using a Windows Machine for Downloading If you download the latest version of the Tulip driver onto a Windows computer, you will probably find that the driver will NOT compile properly after you copy it to your Linux box, since Windows and Linux use different linefeeding. To solve this problem, either (1) download the driver using your Linux box, or (2) if you must download it to a Windows machine, covert(sic) the driver to Linux format with the DOS2UNIX program, which is freely available on most open source sites on the Internet.

I know nothing about this, and have never tried the windows version. If you know what will happen, please let me or Sensei know, so we can get this NHF updated.

3. Compile the tulip driver. Here's the compile command they say to use on the Linksys website:

gcc -DMODULE -D__KERNEL__ -I/usr/src/linux/net/inet -Wall 
-Wstrict-prototypes -O6 -c tulip.c
`[ -f /usr/include/linux/modversions.h ] && echo -DMODVERSIONS`

Here is the command listed at the bottom of the tulip file.

gcc -DMODULE -D__KERNEL__ -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -O6 -c
tulip.c `[ -f /usr/include/linux/modversions.h ] && echo -DMODVERSIONS`

This whole command goes on one line. I never got the first command to work. The second command works well though.

When you compile you will get a few warnings like this:

tulip.c:30: warning: `max_interrupt_work' defined but not used
tulip.c:152: warning: `kernel_version' defined but not used

This is ok, the warnings don't mean a bad compile. Warnings just mean the compiler thinks the code should be written differently.

You should now have a file called tulip.o and your original source file tulip.c.

4. Copy both of these files over to the directory:

/usr/src/linux-VERSION/drivers/net

I personally copied the files directly over the old ones. After all they are totally useless right now.

Stay with me! If you made it this far, we are almost there!

5. put the following line into your /etc/conf.modules file:

alias eth0 tulip

6. Then "depmod -a"

7. "modprobe tulip.o"

7. Configure IP address & routing for it with "netcfg". (At first I didn't realize this command was meant to be launched from x-windows, so I got a bunch of errors attempting to launch it from a regular terminal session. Launch it from a terminal in x-windows and you do better than me)

8. Then restart the network with:

/etc/rc.d/init.d/network restart

9. When I configured my card to this point, I held my breath, opened the Netscape browser, and typed in a web address. It worked. I cried and thanked god that the pain was over. I hope that happens for you (without the crying).

Note: Added 9-14-2000
contributor: Marek Dohojda

If I may add anything to it at all would be to add that this will NOT work with our newest card. The newest card has different chipset and as such requires the newest drives from www.scyld.com (new Donalds Becker work place). From there you need to get netdrivers.tgz file.

Untar it then run make. Then you have to insert pci-scan.o and tulip.o as modules. That is about it (well start network). The reason why I am telling you this that I bet you will get e-mail from people who will be asking you this question.