plain-vanilla ethernet; do brands matter?

[THUFIR HAWAT]

On 6/10/05, fredex <fredex at fcshome.stoneham.ma.us> wrote:
...
> I've heard people say that realtek 8139 cards aren't reliable. All I know
> is I've got two of 'em in my firewall box (Smoothwall Express) and they
> work great. no problems at all. One of 'em is talking to the Toshiba
> cable modem and the other to the cheap offbrand 10/100 switch. both auto-
> negotiated 100mbps (used to have a 10mbit hub and it autonegotiated 10mbps
> then). My motherboard (Gigabyte GA7n400 Pro2) has realtek 8169 chipset
> for lan and it also works fine. One of the nice things about those
> chipseets is that Linux comes with the drivers built-in, so you don't
> mess around with drivers whenever a kernel update comes along.
...

I was at the store asking the clerk to look the product, DFE-538TX, up
on d-link because I couldn't find that exact model number. duhh, he
pulled up the canadian site and there it was, in all its glory:

<http://www.dlink.ca/product.php?PID=124>

for the driver it had "SCO unix,", or something, which made me pause. 
then, duhh again, it has "compatible drivers include: Linux 2.2/2.4"
on the box.  anyhow, I bought it for $9.98.

I hope it works out of the box without recompiling the kernel, we'll
see.  just thought I'd share.  thanks for the help, all.  A friend
should help with the install this evening.


-Thufir