Detection of OOOLD Hardware -- ISA, No PnP, needs kernel 2.0

[FreakWent]

I am told by a man called Donald Becker that to reliably detect ISA non PnP hardware, I might have some luck with a version of the 2.0 kernel with all the drivers compiled in.

With many later distributions, Legacy ISA support has been dropped -- fair enough.

However, Does knoppix still ship old versions? What kernel and NIC drivers did 1.0 use?

In short, is there any way to get this hardware detected that will work better than windows 9x? In Windows the IO address is picked up, I need to play guess & reboot for the interrupt though.

Any ideas?

[mightydavefish]

Maybe if you gave specific examples of what you are trying to use in terms of old hardware this question would be easier to answer. Very specific. Which models of which hardware are you trying to get working?

[FreakWent]

I've got, like, 50 mixed cards.

A random chipset sample includes:
rtl8019AS
3com 835
AT/LANTIC
Compex RL2k-988PA
SMC 83C690LJP
INTEL 201969-221

And my favourite, a UL0020 332AA23240400

There are others. Some are PnP, others aren't. All the jumperselectable ones got used up first.

I want a solution that will let me speed through fifty cards without messing about for hours on each one.