tlug: pcmcia ethernet recommendations?

[John Seebach <jseebach@example.com>]

Howdy.

I paid a visit to a new computer store in Hamamatsu yesterday. They had
pcmcia 10base/T cards on sale for 2900 yen, and I almost bought a pair, but
decided to do a little research first. 

The cards are Corega Ether II PCC-T cards.

There was a TurboLinux flyer on display, advertising the fact that these
cards were "TurboLinux OK." Even the boxes had little penguin stickers on
them. It had a little chart comparing the hardware compatibility of
TurboLinux to that of other distributions, and I was surprised to see that,
according to this chart, this card was not compatible with either Red Hat
5.2J or Debian 2.0. All three were listed as compatible with the Corega
Ether PCC-T card, but only TL was listed for the Corega Ether II PCC-T
card. 

My feeling was that perhaps TurboLinux was trying to stack the marketing
deck in their favor, since the chart was dated July 99, and compared the
latest version of TL with fairly outdated versions of the other two, which
probably shipped with older revs of the pcmcia packages, and that my
laptop, which is running mostly the unstable branch of Debian, wouldn't
have any problems. But, not wanting to be out 6000 yen and change, I decided
to go home and do an internet search first.

I can't find any information at all on the Ether II PCC-T card, only on the
Ether PCC-T, which is listed as usable.

So, two questions:

1) Does anyone know if TurboLinux ships with a nonstandard version of the
pcmcia drivers? i.e they've got some drivers for cards that wouldn't work
for me if I just downloaded the latest pcmcia source and compiled it? Worst
case, I can just check their ftp site for a patch. Best case, there's no
difference and I was just the victim of some weird TL marketing scheme. 

3) Is there anyone who has actually used one of these cards and can verify
that they do indeed work with standard pcmcia packages? Or that they don't?
Or that they do work but they're complete pieces of crap?

John

jseebach@example.com
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