3C509 ethernet card on Hoary Hedgehog

[David Wittenberg]

I just installed Hoary Hedgehog on an old system, which was working
when I got it.  The network card is the ancient and honorable 3Com
Etherlink III 3C 509TP  (note this is not a PCI card.)  When I do a
standard install, it does not recognize the card.  I added the line 
3c509  
to /etc/modules and network settings now says "The interface eth0 is
not configured".  Without that line in /etc/modules, network settings
says nothing about an ethernet connection. 

How can I configure the ethernet connection?  Ideally, I'd like to get
into the friendly installer, as I plan to give this machine to a
friend whose not terribly tech-savy, but I can work my way through
command lines if that's what it takes.

I've looked through the
<http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/NET3-4-HOWTO-5.html> Linux Networking HOWTO
(Version 1.5, August 1999) and the
<http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Ethernet-HOWTO-2.html> Ethernet HOWTO
(version 2.9, August 2003) without success.

Thanks very much for your help.

-- 
--David Wittenberg
dkw at cs.brandeis.edu