Accton Pocket Ethernet and Linux
Some notebooks do not supply a PCMCIA port and so one has to use other
methods to connect them to a LAN. I use a pocket ethernet adapter connected
to the parallel port for this.
It gives quite well performance, i.e. approximately 110 kBytes/sec. As far
as I know there are currently four pocket ethernet drivers available:
- DE600
- DE620
- Realtek / Advansys
- Accton EtherPocket-SP (EN2209)
The appropriate control of the parallel port and adapter seems to be quite
difficult. The timing of the parallel port can be unpredictable and for most
adapters no documentation is freely available. Most of the drivers are based
on disassembled DOS drivers.
The Accton driver is based on the official assembler sources from Accton
which were kindly donated from Accton to the first developers of the Linux
driver. First versions of the drivers were written for the Linux 1.x.x
kernels and had to be adapted to 2.0.*. Michael Engel did this and
fixed some bugs with it. There are still some problems persisting:
- the number of the ethernet interface (i.e. eth0 or eth1 or ethx) is not
detected correctly
- insmodding the driver may fail on the first try, the second insmod
works
- rmmodding does not clean up correctly
But it works perfectly well!
We, i.e. Michael and me, will try to clen up the code, fix the bugs and
integrate the driver into the kernel mainstream source. As long as it is not
included you can download the current driver for 2.0.* kernels from our
FTP
server.
A new version for 2.1.* kernels is ready! You can download it here.
The Accton Adapter (EN2209) was also sold by the german computer store Vobis
as EtherPocket. For more information on the adapter itself you
may want to look directly at the Accton
WWWW server.
Currently I have discovered a small glitch in the 2.1.* driver that causes
the interface's statistics displayed with ifconfig beeing completely wrong!
I will work on this soon...
