Tried and tested Gigbit ethernet card (Linux)

ok guys.

I'm thinking about moving my office lan from 100 to 1000mb as my new PC comes with a built in 1000 card - may as well us it.

Most of the infrastrucutre in the office is linux (eg; file servers). I've read with interest about gigbit NIC's that are supported in linux, and also read horror stories about supposedly supported NIC that don't work. My only experience with gigbit nics under linux are the HP built in NIC (intel I believe) on some of their high end linux servers.

Does anyone have a tried and tested %99 certain opinions and comments on makes/models of NIC that support 1000mb in linux - and do it well ?

I await a flood of responses.

the onboard networking on bloaty uses the (Marvell/Yukon SK-98xx) sk98lin driver, and appears to work fine (at least in 100mbit mode, since i only have 100mbit infrastructure

intel e1000 should also be fairly well supported, some machines at work use e1000

Never had a problem with Realtek chipset based NICs. Currently using a Realtek 8169 Gigabit onboard with (at various times) Gentoo, Ubuntu and Xandros. Also had several Realtek 8139 100Mb cards, and they have all worked flawlessly with every Linux distro I've thrown at them.

my onboards a realtek so thats one problem down.

I plumped for a couple of netgear Ga311's. They have a good rep, 24/7 phone support (which probably won't do me well seeing as its linux) plus my switch is a netgear so it may help with any compatablity "freak" events.

There seems excellent kernel support and the driver is marked stable as of 2.6.6.

I'll make notes on how it goes.

I'm thinking of getting a linksys EG1032 just for an alternate option.

thanks for the feedback