I'm quite new to debian, but liking it right now. However I have a small problem. I am using debian stable 3.0, and by default it installed a 2.2.20 kernel. Everything is working okay, but I decided to get a newer kernel, so I got a 2.4.18 kernel. On the 2.4 kernel however, my network card doesn't work properly. I'm using a via network card on a soyo dragon kt333 motherboard. The card doesn't work with or without the via-rhine module loaded, even though in the 2.2.20 kernel it works without it. My network gets its ip assigned from a dhcp server. Does anyone know how I can get the nic to work properly with the 2.4 kernel? Thanks for any help.

It's very rare that Linux 2.4 kernel doesn't support something that the 2.2 kernel supported.

Does "ifconfig" command (executed from the command line) show eth0 interface?

Here's another thread that discusses similar issues:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=189338


The /etc/network/interfaces file for dhcp connection should look something like this:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

In addition, you'll need an /etc/resolv.conf that includes your DNS:

nameserver xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

Hope this helps!

Thanks for replying. I'm going to take a look and see if I can figure out what's wrong here.

Well, I took a shot at fixing. Unfortunately, I'm totally lost. I'll post up what I did and maybe somebody can help me out.

Here it is:
[list=1][*]On bootup, I noticed that on bootup it says this : Eth0: ERROR while getting interface flags: no such device[*]I ran ifconfig, and it doesn't show eth0[*]I ran ifup, and it gives me "eth0 already configured"[*]I haven't loaded the via-rhine module yet[*]I run ifdown, and this is what I get : cat:/var/run/dhclient.pid:no such file or directory [line break] eth0: error while getting interface flags[*]I ran dhcleint, which took a very long time and exited with no errors and returned to the command line, seemed like it worked[*]I run ifconfig again, which still doesn't show eth0[*]I still haven't loaded the via-rhine module[*]I decide to run ifup again and get "ERROR while getting interface flags: no such device[*]I modprobe via-rhine and it seems to load with no problems[*]Ifconfig still shows no eth0[*]Ifdown appears to work, reporting no errors and exiting to the shell [*]ifconfig shows no eth0[*]ifconfig eth0 up appears to work, evevn showing me the message that I get on startup of the 2.2 kernel, something along the lines of "setting eth0 to full duplex mode"[*]Attempt to ping a machine on the network shows that the network is still unreachable[*]ifdown reports that "interface eth0 is not configure"[*]ifconfig seems to work again[*]I run ifup, and ifconfig shows eth0 as up[*]Network is still unreachable[/list=1]

Well, as you can see, this is getting pretty frustrating. Any help here is mcuh appreciated.


Thanks so much to anybody that bothers to read the monstrous list above. It's appreciatied.

Does anybody have an idea here? Thanks.

try booting up knoppix and see what module it loads for your network.. then compile a kernel with that module

Sorry I haven't responded in a while, I have taken a short absence from computing.


When I tried to boot knoppix, it also couldn't get my network to work. It was also booting the via-rhine module for my network, which should be the one that should work considering it is a via rhine nic. Right now, the only distro that seems to be getting my nic up correctly (besides debain 2.2 kernel) is SUSE linux. I'm going to boot the suse live eveal and see what module that is loading.

Thanks for the help.