I used to be a UNIX user years ago, never an administrator. A few years ago I managed to put a Linux system on a 486 box with VLB on a coax network, and got Samba (sort of) working on it, but I still find Linux baffling.

I currently have an all Windows, all TCP/IP home network. I want to migrate my Windows XP Home system to Linux.

This computer has two PCI network cards. One is a Realtek 8139 that goes to an Internet router that connects to the Internet and most of the home network. I'm not having any problems with it.

Windows says the other card is an AMD PCnet-Home Based Network Adapter (Generic). In Knoppix, lspci says it's an AMD 79c978 [HomePNA] (rev51) with PCI ID 1022:2001. It goes to a similar card on a Win98 box named SLUG in the basement, two stories below the XP.

I boot from the Knoppix 7.04 live CD. I see that it recognizes eth0 and eth1. I can get to the Intenet. I can get to all the Windows boxes that are on the Internet router. I can't get to SLUG. SLUG shows up in the workgroup, probably because the network's browse master knows about it, but when I try to open it I get an error message.

I tried ndiswrapper. Windows uses netamdhl.inf and pcnt5hl.sys for the HomePNA card, so I copy them to root's home directory and run the GUI ndiswrapper configuration. In a root console, ndiswrapper says there's no new hardware and an alternate driver called pcnet32. If I modprobe ndiswrapper and modprobe -r pcnet32, eth0 (or eth1, depending on how Knoppix decides on bootup) no longer exists.

Then I realize that SLUG and both cards are using DHCP, because Windows XP bridged the cards together. I plan to try to bridge them when I finally install Linux, but until I do, SLUG and the HomePNA card need fixed IP addresses. So I go down to SLUG and give it a fixed IP address, the same one it got from DHCP. That works in Windows. Back in Knoppix, I give the HomePNA card a different fixed IP address, but I still can't reach SLUG.

I try ping -I eth0 [or eth1] 192.168.0.170 (that's SLUG's IP address) and the address is unreachable. If I ping -I eth0 [or eth1] 192.168.0.107 (a computer on the Realtek card) I get replies if I use the right eth?, unreachable if I use the wrong one.

I didn't give all the details of what I did, but I hope I did all the right things. At best, ifconfig shows me eth0, eth1, and lo. One of the eth? (depending on what order Knoppix saw them on bootup) has an IP address from DHCP and thousands of RX and TX bytes. The other has the fixed IP address I gave it and zero RX and TX.

I figure either there's no driver for the HomePNA card, or I'm doing something wrong. Can somebody help? Please.