Belkin F5D5020 16 Bit Notebook Networking Card

Rating:
Summary: Not very friendly to Linux
Review: Although this card works very well with Windows products, getting it to work with Linux is not for the beginning or even intermediate user. It is a complicated and tricky process.

Rating:
Summary: Great product from belkin.
Review: Bought this for my laptop and it worked perfect. with no problems.

Rating:
Summary: Very good, user friendly documentation
Review: I bought this card to network my laptop, running Win 2000, with my old desktop, running Win 95.
Of course, with plug and play, installing the cards is just a matter of plugging them in and letting the installation wizard guide you through a few clicks, but as always with Networks, the two computers, running two different operating systems, have to be configured before they can talk to one another. And while the documentation of the PCI card was totally useless in that regard, I found the documentation of the Belkin F5D5020 very well designed, informative and most useful. A good read through it later, my two computers were sharing files and printers, and I was happy I'd bought the right product.

Rating:
Summary: Works with Linux...simple fix
Review: I'd been using one of these for two years on a laptop with Win2K, and was perfectly happy with it; over Christmas I installed Red Hat 9, which did not recognize it. Poking with google, I found that all I had to do was to add four lines to the file /etc/pcmcia/config.opts, namely an empty line followed by

card "Belkin-5020"
version "Belkin", "F5D5020-PCMCIA-Network-Card"
bind "pcnet_cs"

(The second and third lines should be indented by two spaces each.) It now seems as trouble-free on Linux as on Win2K.