I spent some time with the mighty raven in the tbbs-land Linux test lab yesterday. I’d written previously about the Attansic on-board ethernet adapter, which isn’t supported out of the box by Red Hat, though drivers are readily available. A co-worker gave me an old Intel 10/100 PCI NIC, and I thought I was good to go. Well, the case of the computer is a half-height case, the Intel card is a half-height card, but its mounting bracket is full sized, and hence towers above the case by a good inch or two.

No problem; I’ll just head out to the Big Box computer stores; they’ll have NICS in abundance. No luck there, either; not only did Micro Center and Best Buy not have any half-height cards, they only had one model of full heights.

And Micro Center, normally the best source of technical books in the area, has converted their bookstore half-and-half into laptop case display and gaming software.

So, for now, I’ll compile the Attansic driver, and hunt down half-height cards on the internets. I should have done that from the git-go; I don’t like the big box stores.

-k-