Peter Van Lone wrote:
1)the OS has an outdated driver for the device it had correctly detected, or 2)the OS has incorrectly detected the device, and therefore the driver being used is wrong
1) is a possibility, but given that the PCI ids are a match, I doubt it. And certainly not 2).
I'm not sure how to do these things in linux -- if I find a newer version of the tulip driver, do I install it simply by copying the files to the correct location?
Something along those lines. Typically a driver/module that has yet to be included in the kernel tree will be in source form. To install it, you build it, then install it by running "make install". That's the general method.
If I wanted to try, say, the DMFE driver instead of tulip (is this even an option???) how would I do that?
To be honest, I'm not sure. It used to be a simple edit of /etc/module.conf, now /etc/modprobe.conf, but I haven't really worked enough with 2.6 to know my way around. I'm sure someone can tell you how to specify you want to use dmfe instead of tulip. In the meantime, you could just unload the tulip module (rmmod tulip) and load the dmfe instead (modprobe dmfe).
1)dig up an intel pro 10/100 nic from somewhere (I assume these are easily/correctly detected?), or
Any known-brand/chip NIC will do. 10/100 NICs based on Realtek chips sell for less than USD5 on ebay. /Per Jessen, Zürich