LWN - Ports

Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Ports Development Commerce Announcements Back page All in one big page See also: last week's Ports page.	Ports Sparc A new version of SILO is out. This one is "hopefully stable," see the announcement for more. Confused about what framebuffer is in which Sun? Check out the Sun Framebuffer FAQ and get all your questions answered. Alpha Are there too many Alpha Linux web sites popping up? This concern was raised after a series of new site announcements over the last few weeks. The suggestion was made to create a "top level" site as the definitive starting point for those seeking Alpha Linux information. The bulk of the discussion centered around what the URL for this site should be, with a seeming consensus around "alphalinux.org" That domain was registered late last week; hopefully something interesting will be built there. M68K It was asked: is anybody trying to port Linux to the old NeXT m68k boxes? The answer, of course, is "yes." Have a look at Li/Next web page if you are interested in this project. PowerPC The initial reports on the beta version of the bootX utility are very positive. BootX allows Linux PPC users to switch between operating systems painlessly; evidently the switch is anything but painless normally. Here's a new BootX page for those who want to check it out. For those who want to run LinuxPPC without losing access to Macintosh applications: SheepSaver is porting their Macintosh emulator to LinuxPPC. No expected availability dates have been given. See the SheepSaver page for more information on this (commercial) product.	October 8, 1998

	Hardware News An issue came up in September regarding a driver being distributed by NetGear for their FA310TX NIC. This NIC, which originally used the DEC chipset, now uses a clone chip. As a result, Netgear modified the tulip.c driver to support their card. Unfortunately, in the process, the GPL and author information was deleted from the driver! This led to an exchange of email between Donald Becker, author of the tulip.c driver and Netgear. Fortunately, the outcome of this exchange has been very positive. We spoke with Jimmy Su at Netgear and he confirmed that Netgear is: Adding the "COPYING" file to the diskette file, Adding a note within the modified "tulip.c" file stating that the original author is Donald and noting the modifications made to support the FA310TX adapter from NETGEAR Reiterating the information in one of their README.TXT files and encouraging users to come to Netgear for technical support. Jimmy also mentioned that Netgear is working towards gaining full Linux compatibility, providing controller cards and drivers as needed. On the same hardware front, problems with 3Com905B adapters reached a new height this week. As a result, we would like to regurgitate information kindly provided on the newsgroups and websites for those interested. First, the 3Com905B will work with Red Hat 5.1. However, the latest driver from Donald Becker's site is frequently required. Download the 3c59x.c file and compile it using the instructions provided in the file to get a driver compatible with your current kernel. This will need to be dropped into your /lib/modules/2.0.X/net directory and the appropriate line added to your /etc/conf.modules file.
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