While clearing up the office prior to a move, I discovered a couple of Netgear FA331 cards that I'd completely forgotten about. Since there was no possibility of using them for work, I decided to replace the NIC, a Realtek 8139 (aka the worst NIC on the planet), I was using in my Debian box.
I wasn't sure which driver was required for this card, but a little
research on Google turned up natsemi.o as the right one to
use. As I was using a purpose built kernel for my Debian machine, I
had to rebuild the kernel to include National SemiConductor
DP8381x series as a module, under the network drivers section.
The kernel was rebuilt, using the Debian way (note that I have linked
/usr/src/linux to the 2.4.26 kernel source tree
in /usr/local/src):
cd /usr/src/linux make-kpkg clean fakeroot make-kpkg --revision=gold.2.0 --append-to-version="-1" kernel-image dpkg -i /usr/local/src/kernel-image-2.4.26-1_gold.2.0_i386.deb
All that remained to do was add natsemi to /etc/modules
and comment out the 8139too entry.
