A tail of two NICs - help needed

[Geoff Shang]

Hi all:

I just got cable on today and am wrestling with the problem of getting
linux to work with my 2 NICs.  I don't know as muchh about them as I could
unfortunately, but hopefully someone can help me here.   I've also not used
PCI before so I'm not real clear how it goes about allocating resources and
all that.

My problem is that both my cards want to live on IRQ 10.  My original ISA
card (an intel etherexpress pro card) is showing up on IRQ 10 at address
0x300.  I don't think it's PnP - I'm not using ISAPnPtools at any rate.
Anyway, I stuck the NIC that came with the cable connection in the PC (an
SMC1211TX which is a realtek 8139 chipset card), compiled in PCI support
and the realtek driver, and rebooted.  Well, the new card showed up on eth0
and the old one was nowhere to be seen.

I had a chat to the guys on the speakup reflector, and Jim dug up some info
in the
ethernet howto regarding multiple ethernet cards.  In particular, I noted
the ethernet= commandline parameter.  So I tried it out.  Firstly I tried
"ether=10,0x300,eth0) to force the ISA card into being eth0 which would
meen less changes on my part.  This completely failed to work, with eth0
still being the new card and eth1 failing to show up.  I changed the eth0
in the command line param to eth1 and this time it worked ... to a point.
eth1 existed, but it was still on IRQ 10, and so was the new card.  When I
tried to initialise the device, I got the following error:

eth1: unable to get IRQ 10.
SIOCSIFFLAGS: Resourse temporarily unavailable.

Any thoughts?  I'm guessing that the ISA card can't live anywhere else
without fiddling with jumpers or software-configured settings, but I
thought that PCI was fairly flexible.

Geoff.