On Sat, Oct 30, 1999 at 11:28:07PM +0200, Michael Thaler wrote: > Hello! > > I want to buy a pcmcia-ethernet-card for my notebook. I have a Sharp > 9090 and I want to establish a little network with an old Pentium 75. > > First, is a 10 MBit/s card enough or should I buy a 100 MBit/s card? > Are these cards much more expensive?
10 MBit/s is sure to be plenty. I don't think I've ever actually even seen a 100MBit/s network, though my card is capable of using one. Typically I never get speeds over 1MBit/s anyway, so there's a lot of excess capability in a 10 MBit/s network. I guess you only really need to think about a 100M network if you have a lot of machines on your network and you're heavy stuff like video conferencing or large data-bases. There's something else you should probably be aware of. Because of limitations in the bus transferring data between computer and network card, a 100Mbit/s pcmcia (16bit) card actually has a maximum rate of 20Mbit/s. A 100M CardBus (32bit) card has a maximum of 80Mbit/s. > Furthermore, are there any problems with these cards or do they > generaly run with Linux? Are there any prefered cards? I have a Zircom combo pcmcia card (10/100 ethernet + 56K modem (+GSM, ISDN...it's a cool card ;) ) which works great. But it's probably not the cheapest you can find, and other brands can be fine too. Just make sure there's a Linux driver for it first. In particular, I'm not sure how well-tested the Linux support for the cardbus cards is. Good luck, Drew
