I am trying to load a packet driver in DOSBOX, first my system particulars.

I am running Slackware Linux v 12.2 on a kvm800 gigabyte mainboard with a 2.2 ghz AMD processor and 512 mb RAM and DOSBOX v .72

this is my D-Link ethernet PCI card:
Ethernet controller: D-Link System Inc RTL8139 Ethernet (rev 10)

and this is my DOS packet driver

58416 2000-11-21 02:56 dlkrts.com

when I try to load it in DOSBOX I get the following message:

C:\DOSETH1\DLKRTS.COM 0X60
Packet driver for D-Link DFE-530TX+ PCI Adapter version 3.21
(c)Copyright 2000 D-Link Corporation. All rights reserved.

******************** Fail to find PCI device ! ********************

I am trying to load this packet driver in the hopes of running the Arachne WWW Browser in DOSBOX. I can reboot to DOS and this packet driver will load just fine and I can then run arachne, lynx (lynx 386 ported to DOS), telnet.exe and other DOS internet apps just fine, in fact, here is the line in my autoexec.bat

LH c:\doseth1\dlkrts 0x60 > c:\text\ethout.txt

and here is the result as piped to ethout.txt

Packet driver for D-Link DFE-530TX+ PCI Adapter version 3.21
(c)Copyright 2000 D-Link Corporation. All rights reserved.

Line Speed 100 Mbps
Full Duplex
System: [345]86 processor, PCI bus, Two 8259s
Packet driver software interrupt is 0x60
Interrupt number is 0xB
I/O port is 0xB000
My Ethernet address is 00:40:05:81:E4:2A
/fatc/text/ethout.txt lines 1-10/10 (END)

So, we know that is the correct driver for that ethernet card since it works okay when booted to real DOS.

Of course, when running linux the card is detected as eth0 at some point (/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 I believe) the dhcpd (dhcp daemon) runs and gets my local and internet ip address from my router

root@mattsw12:/fatc/doseth1# ifconfig
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:40:05:81:e4:2a
inet addr:192.168.10.101 Bcast:192.168.10.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::240:5ff:fe81:e42a/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST NOTRAILERS RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:231540 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:90821 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:43051979 (41.0 MiB) TX bytes:8376842 (7.9 MiB)
Interrupt:17 Base address:0xb000

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:2745 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:2745 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:294544 (287.6 KiB) TX bytes:294544 (287.6 KiB)

I hope that is enough information to define the problem. So when I try to load the packet driver in linux DOSBOX I get the message PCI device not found as noted above.

Perhaps this is because the card is 'in use' by linux?

I know arachne CAN be run in DOSBOX as I have seen a screenshot of it, and I saw a posting either here or elsewhere of it being using a different packet driver, the NE2000 I believe it was, also I have seen the term 'passthrough' used several times and don't know exactly how, or if it would apply to what I am trying to do here.

Interestingly, in DOSBOX I am able to run my telnetable BBS on port 2000, to do this I set COM1 as a virtual modem in the dosbox.conf and then load a fossil driver, I'm then able to run my BBS on either Wildcat 4 or TRIBBS software.

If there is already and solution to this and I've missed it, I apologize in advance, now that I think about it, the solution I did see might have been for a mac runing OS-X or something like that with the ne2000 driver, a perhaps similiar, but different animal altogether.

Maybe I'm on the wrong track altogether and what I need is a 'virtual' packet driver, much as I use a 'virtual' modem on com1 for my telnetable BBS?

I have seen the mTCP collection, but as I saw pointed out elsewhere, arachne has it's own built in tcp/ip and when in pure DOS I use bootp and DHCP in arachne to get my ip address.

Thanks in advance for any help / insight!!!