Laptop networking update: In the short term, until I fix the Linux driver problem, I now at least have a solution in the form a DOS boot disk with all the necessary drivers to see a Windows share. Now I have a solution, fixing the driver problem becomes less important.

Today I saw something you don't often see - a postman posting a letter. There he was, postal bag over his sholder, putting a letter into a post box...

Yet again Word's grammar checker amazes me. Given the following text "Feature 1: Not present - We do not support this feature", it squiggly underlined "not support" in green and suggested the following replacement "support".

Fun and games with networking hardware over the weekend. The mission was to get my system into a state where my main home PC can act as a NFS server from which to install Linux onto a my laptop. The main PC is booted into Linux (RedHat) 6.2 and has my new D-Link DFE530-TX network card in. The laptop is booting from the appropriate RedHat boot floppy and has a 3Com 3C589C PCMCIA card + network dongle with an RJ45 socket. I also have what was sold to me as a crossover RJ45 cable (and from the look of the colours of the wires it is indeed wired correctly). Shouldn't be too much of a problem I thought, but it turned out be trickier than I had expected. I think I have narrowed the problem down to having an out of date kernal network driver module... so when I next get the chance I shall be rebuilding my kernal+modules. Having checked the D-Link site I now have the latest source for the driver and I hope it's just a case of dropping into place and kicking off a 'make modules'.