I spent waaaay too much time trying to get the Davicom USB NIC to work on Xubuntu 7.04 on Phoebe (my laptop. I name my PCs after funny sitcom characters. The others are Tobias and Kramer.), as detailed here, and finally gave up. First, it was difficult trying to get Make to run in the first place. Since I didn’t have a net connection (I’m installing a NIC remember?), I had to make do with the install CD, and work with Synaptic which I wasn’t familiar yet with. Strangely enough I had to include the CD as a source of packages even after it already mentions the CD as a source twice (looks like a bug).
I finally got Make going by following a recommendation to change the line "#include <linux /config.h>" to "#include <linux /configfs.h> in the dm9601.c file. But my issues didn’t stop there, as after I finally had a hold of the precious dm9601.ko file Make produced, and added it to my modules, it then wouldn’t recognize my USB NIC at all. I read somewhere that it worked for some other guy after a series of reboots and plugging / unplugging, but after several tries of that I got nada.
I gotta tell you after working on and off on that thing for a week, I was severely disheartened (yeah it’s that serious. Serious enough for me to call myself severely disheartened.) I was about to ditch the dang notebook in when the weirdest thing happened – the USB WIFI NIC worked instead.
I got the ultra cheap Justec Wireless G 54 Adapter, for P960.00 at CDR King (no page on their site for it though), and it had Linux drivers for kernel 2.4+ and 2.6+ along with it, even downloadable from the Justec site. Following it was a mere RTFM affair, and it helped that I had linux-headers and build-essentials already installed due to previously trying on the 10/100 LAN NIC. So before I knew it, eth0 was configured to the zd1211 (it’s driver and nick on the wifi network). I had to manually insert a static IP and the essid of my WLAN, and badabing-badaboom, it was connected to DA INNERNET. WAHOOOOO!
So anyway now that Phoebe is ok, I’ve installed apache, php, mysql, phpmyadmin, and later on in the day, WordPress, and a copy of Kikay.