Configuring an old timer ne2000 ISA PNP card

Ubuntu normally installs the network-manager package. This will usually allow you to configure, stop and start your network connections.
Problem with old ISA cards is they don't provide the same level of self-description and auto-configuration as most modern PCI devices do. For instance these old NE2000 compatible cards used to be configured using hardware jumpers, and required the software driver to know what position is configured on the card in order to be able to talk to it.
In my case I had a PCI card installed but some day it broke and I needed to replace it. I took an old NE2000 ISA card out of the closet, and since this PC still had a mix of ISA and PCI slots I was able to remove the PCI card and install the NE2000. However several problems popped up:

• Making the kernel recognise the card

1. Try loading the module manually at the command line in order to see if it recognizes the card. Try "sudo modprobe ne".
   
2. If the kernel doesn't find the card you might have to add parameters to this line to force the kernel to use particular IO addresses or IRQ. eg "sudo modprobe ne io=0x280 irq=10"

• Auto-loading the module at boot
  

1. The kernel module that must be loaded (in my case "ne") can be forced to load at boot in two different ways. One way is to hardcode the module load in /etc/module by simply putting its name (ne) on a single line of its own.
2. Alternatively, you can define it as an alias of "eth0" so that the network start stripts (/etc/init.d/networking) will find it when trying to activate the ethernet interface. You can do that by adding (also to /etc/modules) the line "alias eth0 ne2000". Don't ask why you have to use ne2000 here while the module is called "ne" :-). Make sure to remove the line with the module name '"ne" from /etc/modules if you want to go this way.
   
3. If the kernel doesn't find the card when starting the network you might need to add the parameters (just like when you tested using the command line). This also goes in /etc/modules, on a separate line like "options ne io=0x280 irq=10".
4. Try rebooting.

• Fixing the firefox "offline mode" issue
  

In my case network-manager was still not able to see the card at that point (but the networking was running fine). Except that some applications, like firefox, are somewhat getting the information from network-manager that there is allegedly no network card active, and in the case of firefox it goes to offline mode when starting up. This was such a pain that I removed network-manager altogether : "sudo apt-get remove network-manager".