Seeking Drivers for Unknown Apple Ethernet Card? 102
rbanffy asks: "Does anybody know what this card is? I am resurrecting an old Macintosh LC II and would like to attach it to a network. The card was inside it, but the hard disk had no drivers. It is an LC-PDS Ethernet card with RJ-45 and BNC connectors. The important parts seem to be a SMC 91c92 chip and an EPROM (haven't seen one in years) labeled 'LC ROM 44F0'. Could one of you can identify this critter and point me to the correct drivers?"
Re:Fucking idiot... (Score:1, Funny)
~~~
Slow news day? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Slow news day? (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdot is a lot of different things to a lot of different people. If you don't like "Ask Slashdot" my suggestion is that you turn it off.
Re:Slow news day? (Score:3, Insightful)
And that's the point. Discussing drivers for a 10 y.o. ethernet card, for a 10y.o computer, is not interesting. Nobody cares. Nobody gains anything from the answer to the submitters's question.
Ask slashdot should not become a friggin help desk for every monkey that comes along.
Re:Slow news day? (Score:1)
*clicks No Karma Bonus checkbox*
Re:Slow news day? (Score:2)
Re:Slow news day? (Score:2)
Re:Slow news day? (Score:1)
Now you know.
Re:Slow news day? (Score:1)
Ask slashdot is international, deal.
There are local techie groups for most about everything, if not, you got a great excuse to start one don't you?
Re:Slow news day? (Score:2)
Re:Slow news day? (Score:1)
Re:Slow news day? (Score:2)
"Nobody cares. Nobody gains anything from the answer to the submitters's question."
The methods suggested for obtaining an answer
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:And how exactly did this get posted? (Score:2, Insightful)
Unless you're proposing that questions posed to the teeming masses of Slashdotia should be put where nobody will see them...
Re:And how exactly did this get posted? (Score:4, Informative)
The way I usually figure out what cards are and/or what settings they have is to boot a Slackware boot/root diskette set on the machine and read the kernel messages from the bootup. That's how I figured out the IRQ/IO addressing on the NE2000 card in the machine I run Minix on. Can't do that on a Mac, but you CAN boot up NetBSD, which is just as good.
Mac Driver Museum (Score:5, Informative)
More future "Ask Slashdot" topics (Score:5, Funny)
"Ever see that movie where the guy gets the axe at the end and it takes place in the forest or something? I saw it when I was 7. What is it?"
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"Ever play this game where you're this taxi and you have to pick up people and drop them off? They say "Pad 1 please!" and you have to drop them off at pad 1 while being careful not to land too hard. What is it?"
"I saw this picture of a bunch of red sand and rocks and it was like 10 megapixels big. What is that?"
"I saw this guy driving down the highway with a bunch of blue lights coming out of the bottom of his car. What are those?"
Re:More future "Ask Slashdot" topics (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:More future "Ask Slashdot" topics (Score:1)
Re:More future "Ask Slashdot" topics (Score:5, Insightful)
The submitter committed a number of grievious violations of netiquette.
* The submitter already knows part numbers. This is a Google problem. He should have already looked these up and need no help with these.
* If the submitter is unable to find part numbers, software procedures should have been tried. I'm not sure (never owned an LC-era machine) but if I wanted to know what a strange PCI card was, I'd pop it in my x86 Linux box and check
* A picture is unlikely to help. Asking people to tear up their LCs for similar-looking cards is ridiculous.
* This question should, if the submitter could obtain *no* information at all themselves, then have gone to a classic Mac specific tech forum. Apple-based, one of the Usenet groups, IRC. All three should have been tried.
* In general, old hardware identification is a pretty drudge task. It's not something you ask other people to do. It's time-consuming, not particularly interesting, and a waste of time, since it's not going to be useful to other people. The kind of tech questions you want to ask (and gurus want to answer) are those that will help others as well. If you can't fix this yourself, instead of asking a quarter-million people to spend hours of skilled time solving your problem, buy a bloody used Ethernet card. I don't care who you are, you can afford it. People throw these things out.
The degeneration of Ask Slashdot is wildly frusterating to me. Ask Slashdot really is a useful feature, but it's incredibly abused. On the up side, it allows people to ask questions that require more feedback than just a poll. For example, "What is your favorite set of Google tricks?" or "What security procedures do you use for SSH key distribution?" Here we have something that will be useful and interesting to many techies, but will not be available on the Web. Furthermore, any of these are likely to produce futher conversation. This differs wildly from stories like the current one, which are of no use to anyoen but the submitter.
The other way Ask Slashdot is frequently abused is to post stories that are too uninteresting or biased to be accepted in the regular categories. Frequently, these take the form of "blah blah blah How do you feel about this? What suggestions do you have for SCO/Microsoft/etc?" This is simply not an appropriate forum for stories like this. If they aren't interesting enough for the proper categories, they aren't interesting enough to be on Slashdot.
The editors are also at fault for allowing so many poor Ask Slashdots to slip by.
Re:More future "Ask Slashdot" topics (Score:1)
Re:More future "Ask Slashdot" topics (Score:2)
Re:More future "Ask Slashdot" topics (Score:2, Informative)
Additionally, since this is an m68k box, it's highly unlikely he has a spare one running Linux kicking around. Installing Linux onto an m68k box isn't fun, I speak from experience, and given that the LC II is a '030 and he obviously doesn't have the 68882 FPU, it's highly unlikely that trying is even worth the effort.
Re:More future "Ask Slashdot" topics (Score:1)
Not a PCI card (Score:1)
No, it's a PDS card. PDS stands for Processor Direct Slot. Never seen one of them in an x86 box!
I bought one of these same cards for my LC III back in the day, but that was a few machines ago. I
Re:Not a PCI card (Score:2)
Re:More future "Ask Slashdot" topics (Score:2)
Noise (Score:2)
Oops, I'm fresh out of irony. Going to flame mode.
Everyone who uses Slashdot is into online discussion. And why not? You learn stuff, you meet people, you exercise the brain cells defending your point of view. So resources that facilitate online discussion -- web communities like Slashdot, W
Re:Noise (Score:4, Insightful)
I can usually tell by the subject line that it is spam and I just delete it.
I could tell from "Seeking Drivers for Unknown Apple Ethernet Card?" that this particular "Ask Slashdot" was probably about somebody with an old Apple ethernet card. The only Apple hardware I've got is an old IIe with no software but I still thought I might learn something from the replies, and I did.
Unfortunately part of what I learned (or re-learned, 'cause it seems every "Ask Slashdot" includes people complaining about the topic) is that a lot of people seem to have enough spare time that they can spare some to go into a thread in which they have no interest and complain about the topic.
I don't have time to read each and every last word posted to Slashdot in all the different categories so I generally only read the stuff in which I'm interested and leave the rest for those who care about that. If an "Ask Slashdot" about where to find great rap and hip-hop MP3s showed up in the list I probably wouldn't bother to click on the link, but if someone else gets some benefit out of it then good for them. I certainly wouldn't go into the thread just to post a bitch about the fact of its existence. I don't understand why that's such a difficult concept for others to grasp, and I really don't understand why there are so many people going through their lives desperately worried that someone, somewhere, is thinking about submitting an "Ask Slashdot" to which they might have found the answer elsewhere. Are there other, much more fascinating "Ask Slashdot" submissions going ignored by the editors in favor of the ones which are accepted?
Re:Noise (Score:2)
This is not an issue where the topic is simply not of interest to me. It's where answers are unlikely to help other people. A topic of "What would you do to identify unknown cards?" might have produced similar information, but been much more useful.
Now, you can play the "just ignore what you don't want" card, but you're oversimplifying things.
Re:More future "Ask Slashdot" topics (Score:1)
Well, at least the long tradition of bad speling lives on to this day.
Re:More future "Ask Slashdot" topics (Score:2)
Re:More future "Ask Slashdot" topics (Score:1)
Re:More future "Ask Slashdot" topics (Score:5, Informative)
Next.
Re:More future "Ask Slashdot" topics (Score:1)
Okay, how about this one. When I was in fourth grade or so, I read a book about this guy (a king maybe?) who had a magic sword that attracted strands of magic, that he could then pull on to make stuff happen. That's as much as I remember from the story, except that I have the impression that the guy was rather annoyed at having to drag this magic sword around all the time and the strands would sometimes get in his way. What's the title?
Re:More future "Ask Slashdot" topics (Score:2)
"I saw a picture of this guy [akamai.net] who claims to be preseident of Apple. I'm pretty sure that it's the author Salman Rushdie. Can anyone help me prove it?"
Hmm, it's even on-topic!
Re:More future "Ask Slashdot" topics (Score:1)
Shockingly enough, CBC Radio, on the now defunct show "Basic Black", had an hour long segment, every week, that did exactly that. It was HUGE. People would call in with the more horribly rendered tunes and they'd identify them. People loved it.
The /. editors would never start it becuase they'd be unable to stop.
Though they never did a Kylie song...
Re:More future "Ask Slashdot" topics (Score:1)
Re:More future "Ask Slashdot" topics (Score:2)
FCC ID (Score:5, Informative)
And if that doesn't work... (Score:3, Informative)
Is this it? (Score:5, Informative)
I found this on mirror.apple.com. [apple.com]
The readme file for this driver is here [apple.com].
To quote:
"Apple Ethernet LC driver file version 1.0.1 This driver file contains drivers for all Apple LC PDS ethernet cards and is installed in the extensions folder."
That was, like, two minutes work on Google. What gives?
Re:Is this it? (Score:2, Insightful)
As long as people can ask lame questions and get decent answers, they're just going to continue asking them.
Re:Is this it? (Score:5, Funny)
I whole heartedly apologise for ruining your coffee break, and quite possibly, your entire month.
Re:Is this it? (Score:1)
You're only supposed to read Slashdot on your own time? Uh oh...
Re:Is this it? (Score:1)
Re:Is this it? (Score:2)
Apple's Network Card drivers are designed to work with Apple branded network cards and many other similar cards (many Sonic and Asante cards). I would install these drivers as a starting point, then if they don't work try some investigating ( reading down in the comments, the card in question appears to be a Focus Etherlan II, which look familar to me as one that you can use the Apple drivers on. )
Re:Is this it? (Score:1, Flamebait)
That means 99.9% of the time, the driver you need is bundled with MacOS.
Re:Is this it? (Score:1)
Re:Is this it? (Score:2)
Looks like a Focus EtherLAN II. (Score:4, Funny)
The datasheet for the SMC91cXXX family is here [mit.edu] in case that helps at all.
P.S. I've never opened up a Mac.
P.P.S. Unless gravitationally-induced acceleration counts.
Re:Drivers (Score:4, Insightful)
On a website for nerds, an article about messing about with a 10 year old computer seems right as place. Perhaps you should try messing about with old kit and old operating systems. It's actually a huge amount of fun.
And in terms of job hunting, you are going to get hired based on commerical experience and qualifications rather that what you tinker with at home.
Re:Drivers (Score:2)
Hint: "Qualifications" means what you can do, it doesn't matter where you learned it.
Most companies have a mix of old and new hardware. You typically should be familiar with both. And problem solving skills are always applicable to new situations and as such this is a useful exercise. However, using "ask slashdot" was a pretty weak and un-geekly method of finding the answer. A better qu
Re:Drivers (Score:2)
Re:Drivers (Score:1)
old mac driver (Score:1)
how to find info on google (Score:2)
longer answer
get the fcc id , it's probably on the other side of the card
enter "fcc" and the id in google.
now you know who made the card, and maybe what it's called.
go back to google and enter the name of the card , and something like "driver"
I'll guess it's a Focus Etherlan II, and that there are drivers for it here [macdrivermuseum.com]
Now I'll go back to solving my own problems
For MacOS or other OS? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:For MacOS or other OS? (Score:1)
Just to add that I have emailed the person with a possible set of drivers. Only time and testing will tell on the person's part. If I'm correct, the answer was here:
http://www.ujmacs.co.jp/support/nic.html
If I'm wrong, it wasn't and I wasn't on the right track. From the 5 minutes of searching I've done I found it is probably an Asante MacCon CS or similar going by the chipset name. If the party wants to run Linux or BSD on it they probably won't have too many problems doing so (as drivers seem to have
Re:For MacOS or other OS? (Score:1)
Maybe? (Score:1)
Re:Maybe? (Score:2)
Re:Maybe? (Score:1)
Re:Maybe? (Score:2)
Hmm... (Score:1)
i just mailed someone at SMC (Score:2)
i know one of the german SMC office's CEOs -- i mailed him the pic and asked him to refer to one of his techs if (s)he knows more. if i get an answer -- you will get mine
greetz,
[//eclipser]
Used to have one of those cards... (Score:1)
I used to have a card that looked exactly like that, in an LC II I got from my high school. I have no idea what brand or model it is.
It worked perfectly with a default System 7.5 install (using the network access disk to boot (Iomega driver bunged in), and then a SCSI Zip drive to install 7.5.3 and the 7.5.5 update), so I assume the drivers are bundled with the System 7.5 software.
Oh, and it's really, really slow.
Hope this helps.
Just works (Score:2)
Go get a Realtek ethernet card (Score:1)
http://www.driverguide.com will have the driver archived for the mac, particulary the OS 7.X version.
I do believe that realtek.com will have the reference drivers for the mac as well..
Re:Go get a Realtek ethernet card (Score:2)
Re:Go get a Realtek ethernet card (Score:1)
Re:Go get a Realtek ethernet card (Score:1)
The LCII has NO PCI, NO ISA, not even NuBus. Just PDS (processor direct slot).
You CANNOT just cram a PCI or ISA card in it.
KTHX.
~PayPaI
Re:Go get a Realtek ethernet card (Score:1)
Re:Go get a Realtek ethernet card (Score:2)
Re:Go get a Realtek ethernet card (Score:1)
I am far too n00b to read articles, much less linked images !
Can you see that I am serious ??
It's an LC PDS slot (Score:1)
Re:It's an LC PDS slot (Score:1)
The Mac II series contains exactly 5 different types of expansion slots:
Nubus, '030 PDS, LC PDS, LCIII PDS, CommSlot.
None of them are compatible; there is no easy way to denote manufacturer/model unless it is written on the card; and NO, Apple drivers only work with Apple-branded cards.
So there.
Re:It's an LC PDS slot (Score:1)
http://deru.mac.tucows.com/preview/207027
It either works or it's broken. (Score:2, Informative)
Any EPROM card will work without special drivers, as long as you have an appropriate system installed. 6.0.8 and up, I believe.
Your LC II can only run from System 7.0.1 to 7.5.5, and those have been made available for free download on Apple's site, at their Older Software Downloads page. [apple.com] Heh, there's even Windows software there! Most EPROM-labeled stuff carries somewhat of a rule of thumb with it.. either it works with the default OS install or it's dead. They were
Would I Need a License? (Score:2)
I've sent a similar request to various automotive forums. Has anyone ever driven a Ford Lately?
68k Mac Liberation army (Score:2)
Re:68k Mac Liberation army (Score:1)
But it's running some crap MS board.. it dies if there's more than like 70 people on it.. please don't visit haha
Driver (Score:1)
Oh, and about the FCC ID: I have _never_ found any information about a piece of hardware using the FCC ID. Honest.