Handy Portable Ethernet Pocket Adapter

13Jan/220

Handy Portable Ethernet Pocket Adapter

Aaand another impulse purchase from eBay: a Handy Portable Ethernet Pocket Adapter. What a name? Turns out this is a clone of the Accton EN2209. Finding software wasn't the easiest, but somehow a university in Taiwan had the required file.

Installation on a 486

My IBM PS/1 486 received this unit (after a WFW311 upgrade) and worked perfectly with it. Installation was very straight forward! Just download TCP/IP for WFW and install it as an additional protocol. DHCP worked fine.

Installation on a PIII-500mhz

Things got awry from here. Firstly, running WFW311 on a PIII-500 with 512mb RAM is probably not a recommended thing to do... but... it installed so quickly... it was lovely. The adapter drivers installed and came up on a reboot. As soon as TCP/IP was installed, the whole machine froze!

That second transmission light just stayed locked on and the whole machine actually became non-responsive. Seems to be some kind of race condition with the device... so... what to do? After thinking it was Parallel port settings, I changed them all to no avail. I then guessed it was clock speed, so I down-graded the 500mhz to the slowest setting possible: 333mhz.

At 333mhz, the unit worked perfectly! WFW311 on this hardware is lovely! :) I then upgraded to 375mhz (75mhz bus), but it was NOT stable. WFW311 would lock every-other-time when booting? Seems 333mhz is the magic number.

What about Linux?

I started digging around for a Linux driver and found a few hits on the parport mailing list. These then lead me to harshman's archived page containing a driver! Seems it needs Kernel 2.0.30, so I went back to le'googs and started hunting.

Since I love Red Hat Linux so much, I jumped over to their page and checked the version history. Nice, we have a matched kernel with Red Hat Linux Version 4.2! Back to the Red Hat Linux Archive and there's a 4.2 folder... but wait, there's no ISO in the expected folder? Fortunately, the main guts of the OS are still available and we can then make our own installation media. Download that folder and copy it ALL onto a blank CD. Then jump into the images folder and write boot.img to a floppy. Special thanks to grem75 in this reddit thread for pointing out the required steps.

But that actually didn't work... No matter what I copied over, the installer baulked with an unrecognised Red Hat CD. So, I then downloaded the ISOs from archive.org. I'm surprised that didn't come up as a first search result, but then it occurred to me that archive.org never does? Has it blocked google?

Meanwhile, no amount of burning that image under Windows would work! I even tried to boot up an old ThinkPad with Linux Mint and wodim to try and get it to burn successfully. It didn't... it seems there's an issue with those images on archive.org? Finally, I used the FTP method and an NE2000 compatible card I had lying around to install RedHat.

Once RedHat 4.2 was up, I followed the instructions on harshman's page and, after a first failed insmod, the unit came up on the second attempt, received an IP and I was able to ftp into redhat! Amazing! This was also on the 500mhz at 100% speed, so no race conditions here!

Finally, if you check harshman's page, you'll note that he notes that there's already an updated version whilst he was making his... I wonder if a newer version of RedHat will support this unit?