20080613

Olicom OC-2220 works

After applying John Bladwin's MPSAFE patches to the ex driver, the ex driver works with the Olicom OC-2220. If you are unfamiliar with this card, I'm not surprised. It was made in the mid 1990's. From a network perspective, it isn't that important. It is a slow 10BaseT card that doesn't seem to do full duplex.

However, from the PC Card perspective, there's some interesting things with ex. There's the Olicom OC-2232 that includes a modem. But it includes it in an interesting way that isn't quite standard. How do we pull in the serial port in this case? There's also some cards from Silicom that have a serial port bolted on as well, but in a different way. i've not seen good documentation for either of these cards, but at least there's a driver for the silicom available (or was once upon a time) for Linux. I sure hope that wasn't one of the things I lost in my disk crash...

So again, despite the age of the underlying chip, there's some interesting problems here. The trouble is that the problems are such that they can't easily be solved in an hour of hacking, so they may continue to linger....

3 comments:

Warner Losh said...

Based on the search terms that brought you here, there's a few things to say.

First, I don't know where to find drivers for windows for these cards. I found some years ago that I lost in a hard disk crash.

Second, there's no Linux driver for the OC-2220, OC-2231 or OC-2232. I've been looking for years for hints about how to make them work. FreeBSD is the only open source operating system that has drivers for this card. Goes somewhat against the grain of the general statement "Linux supports more hardware," but there you are.

Third, if you do know where to find a Linux driver, please leave a comment here and I'll share.

Nick Zahedi said...

I found this site and it looks promising, but I don't understand it. http://pcdrivers.de/olicom-gocard-ethernet-pc-card-oc-2220-32-bit-odi-driver/download-1708.html

Also I plugged in a OC-2231 to a laptop with Windows 2000 and it installed itself.

Anonymous said...

Somebody can help me finding a working driver for the OC-2220 card for WinXP or Win2k? Links in previous comment does not help. Please