NIC driver

[Erik Price]

I have used Linux for quite some time, but have very little experience 
with installing it.  Having recently started a new job, I have been 
given a Windows box and told that it's okay if I want to put Linux on 
it.  And I do.

So I downloaded jigdo, used that to download and build the Debian Disc1 
disc image, and built a startup CD.  Only for some reason, booting from 
CD prevented the Debian Installer from recognizing my hard drives.  
Creating a rescue and root floppy with rawrite2.exe solved this 
problem, and I went about my installation.

Everything has gone just fine except for a few things, so I have some 
questions.

(1) First and foremost, I'd like to be able to use the internet from 
this machine, but the Debian Installer failed to recognize the 
installed ethernet card.  It's a 3C918 card.  From some googling 
around, it appears that this is just a standard 3Com 3C905B card that 
is packaged into some Dell computers (the machine is a Dell).  But I'm 
not sure how to go about installing the driver for this card, or 
getting the system to recognize it -- does it require me to recompile 
the kernel?  I inspected /etc/network/interfaces but it doesn't have 
much to offer.

(2) Second and nextmost, I'd like to run X11 on the machine.  
Unfortunately, I can't get it to work, though I've tried a few 
different video settings.  I found some of these settings by booting 
into Windows and checking the Device Manager in the Control Panel and I 
have used the xf86config program to try different parameters, but X11 
still fails to run correctly.  Most unfortunate is that since I can't 
get the system online, I can't email the errors that are shown to me 
when I do try to run "startx &".  (Actually I'm not certain I'd be able 
to redirect them to a file as they are not STDOUT from a utility, but 
rather displayed from within some kind of full-screen, colored program 
with a scroll bar that is controlled with arrow keys... anyone have any 
idea what I'm talking about?)

Any advice at all is much appreciated.



Erik




--
Erik Price                                   (zombies roam)

email: erikprice at mac.com
jabber: erikprice at jabber.org