network card setup crashes hard

[Ralph W. Reid]

I am trying to get a PCI NIC running in my old Pentium-133, and so far
the project is not going too well.  The card is made by Hawkins (I
think), and the chip set is the Realtek 8139 spider set.  Linux finds
the chip set via the 8139too module, but an error in syslog indicates
that no IRQ could be generated, and that I should use `pci=biosirq'.
When I include `pci=biosirq' on the line at the boot prompt, the boot
process starts okay, except that I can not mute my speech synthesizer.
When the boot process reaches the point where the kernel tries to
detect PCI devices, a general protection fault occurs, and the whole
system comes to a stop after the register and stack info produced by
the crash is spoken.  I really do need to get some kind of respectable
NIC working in this system soon, so any helpful suggestions would be
appreciated.

Here is the basic info on my system:
Pentium CPU running at 133 MHz
64 MB RAM
8 GB hard drive with enough space left on it to handle this task
Accent PC speech synthesizer on the ISA bus
VGA card on the ISA bus
33.6 Kbps MODEM on the ISA bus
some sort of PNP sound card on the ISA bus (run by ALSA)
3.5 inch floppy
14 inch VGA monitor
101 key keyboard
Slackware 9.0
2.4.20 kernel with Speakup as produced by Slackware

So far, I have not been able to get `ifconfig' to access the new NIC
to create eth0.  I was hoping to get a newer computer later this year,
but right now is not a good time for me to make that kind of purchase.
So, any helpful suggestions would be very much appreciated.  Thanks,
and have a _great_ day!

-- 
Ralph.  N6BNO.  Wisdom comes from central processing, not from I/O.
rreid at sunset.net  http://personalweb.sunset.net/~rreid
Opinions herein are either mine or they are flame bait.
SECANT (x) = TAN (x) / COTAN (x)