Realtek 8039 cards do exist. For a long time people said they had them but they were wrong, at least if they claimed "it works with Linux".

No driver exists that will bind to a real 8039. It's not worth writing a driver for a $17 ethernet card. It's not worth the time to return it, and despite "it works with windows" it's useless to me. I hate Realtek.

This isn't the same thing as the time that some company (Linksys, maybe?) was producing sets of ethernet cards that bore the same model number yet has wildly varying chipsets on them, is it?

Yeah, probably.

Chiming in.

Forget the model numbers. Look at the FCC ID #. That always nails which unit you have.

Yeah. I think the Linksys USB dongles that were used for the Rio Central changed chipset without warning. Linksys or D-Link did the same thing on some of their WiFi cards.

Doesn't matter what the FCC ID is: the pci id of the device is not one any Linux driver binds to. I'm screwed.

I hate Realtek.

Hehe. I know that feeling, it's a real crap shoot when your buy Realtek.

I bought a cheap 802.11b card that had a Realtek chipset that supposedly worked with linux. After a couple of days I gave up, donated it to my wife for her laptop and bought a Prism54 card (which is _excellent_ using 2.6.x)

This isn't the same thing as the time that some company (Linksys, maybe?) was producing sets of ethernet cards that bore the same model number yet has wildly varying chipsets on them, is it?

This is one reason I will never touch a Linksys NIC. Even in windows this was a pain in the ass. I remember trying to help a friend get his NIC working in 2000. It had a slightly newer chip on it then 2000 knew about, so we had to download drivers. Problem is, Linksys didn't even have one bundle to cover all cards. After 3 failed attempts at guessing based on the part of the card we could see with the cover off, he had to power the box down and pull the damn thing out to get a look at it.

Pure evil.

hmm I seem to remember getting one to work under linux by using the NE 2000 driver. but then again, my memory is not always accurate that far back. I've found that a cheap nic that has worked for me flawlessly under linux is something with the sis900 chip in it. It's about the same price and I haven't had any problems with it and the module is pretty standard with contemporary kernels.

What the heck is an 8039 ??

Lots of Realtek 8139 cards around, and I've yet to find one that doesn't work with Linux (unlike Tulip based cards.. yuck!).

Cheers

This brings me to a question. Why the hell don't they print the damn model/revision number on cards? They print everything else, including numbers for all the little surface mount crap on the cards. do the robots that build them REALLY need to know that c87 is supposed to go there? Doesn't it already know? So why not print something useful? I'm looking at my old video card. It says "Made in Taiwan" in 3 different places. Not once is the make/model mentioned.

I had an 8039 way back (sometime in the late-mid 90s) it was a 10BaseT ISA Ethernet card.