One for the hardware gurus

Having acquired a Gateway Flexatxstc BRO 600 which is working fine I successfully installed the Ubuntu 10.04 Live CD. As this is such a nice compact machine, albeit old, I'm thinking about using it as the dedicated EMC2 processor instead of the Dell GX240. This chassis is devoid of LAN and Parallel ports but has two half height PCI slots. To date the best advice for the parallel card seems to be based on the 9845/9865 chip-sets or (if budget permits) the Mesa 5i25 cards.

I'd like to hear the collective opinion on a half height LAN card that is likely to work "straight out of the box", or better still, a (cheap) wifi card to save me running a CAT5 into the workshop to download updates or carrying the PC back into the house.

Hi

I fitted this LAN card with the Realtek 8139D chipset to a PII piece of rubbish that would barely run Win95 and it worked fine.
The computer came with a mill and had the original DOS based software on it.
I converted as soon as I could, it was c**p.

You are in the UK, you can have it for the price of the postage, I will never use it again.

Alternately they are on ebay for under £3 with free P&P

I would just use 2 homeplugs and have a wired LAN connection, wireless is too easily knocked out by electrical interference from motors, concrete walls etc.

regards

Many thanks for the kind offer of the 10/100 PCI card and the advice re wifi. I will mull over the option of running CAT 5/6 to the workshop as it'll involve either a catenary or trenching for a duct.
I think I already have a unused Intel LAN card on its way to me from a friend in Yorkshire so I'd ask you to hang on to it just in case.
Are there any UK outlets for Mesa cards?

Are there any UK outlets for Mesa cards?

Not as far as I know, cncbasher bought some cards recently and I am sure they shipped from the US.

It is annoying, because we end up paying the same in £s as someone in the US does in $s, by the time you pay overseas shipping.

For that reason I have always used breakout boards, spindle control boards etc from DIYCNC in the UK.
Roy not only is cheaper than the likes of CNC4PC for the same item, he makes them to order and there is just 1st class post on top.

regards

www.duzi.cz/shop_cnc/
delivery times about a week

I knew they came from abroad, US was an assumption

1 Czech Krona = £0.0326328004

Happy calculating!!

I ran two CAT5 cables and an extra pull line in conduit out to my shop, works great. Much better in my case than wireless.

Rick G

Reply to ArcEye.

The LAN card from my friend in Yorkshire arrived today. After carrying out the hack to fit a full height card into a half height PCI slot it is up and running fine.

However many thanks for you kind offer anyway.