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Intel D425KT/Realtek 8105E Networking under FreeDOS 1.3

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First post, by Reb00trr

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Hello everyone,

Sorry for my first ever post to be a "Help, I'm stuck!" type one, but I really am scuppered at the moment.

I have been undertaking a project to use some low-end/old/old AND low-end hardware as my daily driver PC (I have some reasons, a hat full of them, but I'm sure most are going to sound at best silly and at worst like I've lost my mind) using FreeDOS and AntiX Linux as my OS's of choice.

Hardware wise I've settled on the D425KT/D525MW, both being Atom based ITX boards with Realtek 8105E based Fast Ethernet that are about 14 or so years old. Picked the boards because of being passively cooled (bit of a silent computing 'enthusiast'), having a parallel port (direct DOS printing) and, yes, the Realtek networking which, until tonight, I thought meant I was home free because I found a packet driver and, failing that, there are NDIS2 drivers for almost all Realtek cards...which I thought again meant I would have minimum problems/were well supported in DOS.

Except now, tonight, I finally got around to hooking up the board to a PSU to have a play about and fell flat on my face at the fist hurdle; when I run "RTSPKT.COM 0x60" it just tells me it can't find the card. In the past? On other machines I have tried FreeDOS on (an Asus EEE 701 and Dell Latitude D520) all I needed to do was find the packet driver and run it with the "0x60" after (which, I understand, is the software interrupt?) and bada-bing, I was online.

Am I being stupid? Chances are high that I am, I know.

Is there some extra magic handshake I need to do with the packet driver? The packet driver technically is for a 8139 card, but it seems that the two are largely interchangeable? And, if the packet driver I've found really doesn't work with the 8105E, how in the blazes do you use NDIS?

The main goal is to be able to use the mTCP apps/utilities to do some BBS, a dash of IRC and a sprinkling of FTP.

Thanks in advance for any possible insights you might be able to provide.

Chips

P.S. I'm very, very much a DOS/FreeDOS noob so...please use small words. 😁

Reply 1 of 1, by MERCURY127

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0) connect your NIC to DHCP aware router, or set IP manually in WATTCP.CFG (rename .cf to .cfg) after step 2;
1) create C:\LANMAN folder (NDIS or ODI drivers want live here, i not remember which exactly);
2) unpack linked archive http://sendfile.su/1695629 (7zip, pwd 1) to this foider;
3) try run RTGPKT.COM or RTLPKT.COM or PCIPKT.COM or RTSPKT.COM;
4) and test result by running TCPINFO or/and SNTP.BAT (look for TZ warning!);
5) if have no success:
6) adjust PROTOCOL.INI (for NDIS-to-pkt N2P.BAT and *ND*.DOS drivers) or NET.CFG (for ODI-to-pkt O2P.BAT and *ODI*.COM drivers), try different NDIS or ODI drivers,
7) and test result by running TCPINFO and SNTP.BAT.

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