I have FC4 running and I would like to switch from the 3Com card to the Linksys Gigabit card. FC4 sees both with no problem but:

1. Will only activate eth0 on bootup no matter what I do in the Gnome networking aplets where it identifies the Gigabit card as eth1.

2. When I try to deactivate the 3Com on eth0 and double-click on the cards to switch eth numbers, then FC4 sees BOTH cards as 3Com cards!

3. If I do a fresh install without the 3Com, it doesn't activate the eth0 on bootup.

4. The hardware browser applet correctly sees both cards and identifies the drivers.

I would really like to get the Linksys card working due to its greater speed.

I'm stumped. Any suggestions?

Thanks.

Your problems are similar to ones I had when reversing eth0/eth1 for two NIC cards under FC4.

Like you, I was putting in a gigabit NIC (SysKonnect SK-9521), wanted it to be eth0, but wanted to keep the old card in the system. In the end, I (1) removed both NICs, (2) booted into runlevel 3 once, (3) installed only the gigabit NIC, (4) booted into runlevel 3 followed by startx and (5) configured the gigabit NIC using the redhat GUI config.

As I recall, it had to be “activated” in the GUI to get it to run the first time, but thereafter worked fine after rebooting. Then, I put the old NIC back in and configured it. I was using the old NIC to bridge to the 10/100 segment of the LAN, but that didn’t turn out to be as useful as I expected, so I eventually took the old NIC out.

Thanks for your help. I'll try it. Actually, I don't need the 3Com card in there if the Gigabit card works.

I'm still learning with Linux. How do I force it to boot up at level 3 since it currently defaults to X-windows?

Thanks again.

There are at least two ways to boot into runlevel 3.

The first, which I don’t usually use, is to edit /etc/inittab and change the default to 3 instead of 5. Once you open inittab, what you will need to do will become very obvious.

The second method is a one-time change made at the grub boot menu stage (i.e., when it says “press any key...”). After “pressing any key” and using the commands listed below the menu, you edit the line you normally boot with and then edit the kernel line that appears on the next screen.

To the end of the kernel line, you add “ init 3” (without the quotation marks), save the line and then boot. Again, all of the editing commands will be listed on the screen.

The main reason for going through runlevel 3 is to avoid a timeout while answering the kudzu-generated questions about hardware changes. When booting into runlevel 5, it seems like you only have about 30 seconds to go through the configuration questions before it times out. And if you don’t finish the final question, no hardware configuration changes will be made.

When booting into runlevel 3, you have as much time as you need to answer the questions.

Thanks again for the feedback. Earlier today I tried your suggestion but going through the normal boot-up. It saw the Gigabit card but even though I was logged in as root, I couldn't activate it.

It gave me the message: "Cannot activate network device eth0!
SK98lin device eth0 does not seem to be present, delaying initialization."

Get it's showing the Gigabit card!

So, I did a Google again and found an old posting from FC3 days which suggests that the driver provided with FC4 only solved one of the previous problems, card recognition. The other problem seems to deal with bandwith which is what I think is causing things to choke.

Anyway, I've put the 3Com back in for now and will hope for things to work in FC5.

Thanks again for your help.

Both Linksys gigabit NICs (EG1032 V2.0 , EG1064 V2.0) were supported early on in the kernel 2.6 development ( http://www.linuxhq.com/kernel/v2.6/0...rs/net/Kconfig ), but who knows what has happened since then.

Linksys has a bad habit of changing hardware on their NICs without changing the NIC part number. Their LNE100TX, which has been both praised (tulip driver) and cursed (oops, tulip doesn’t work on this one) by linux users, is a good example of that problem.

Note that Linksys does not even hint at linux support for its gigabit NICs on its support site. That by itself makes their NICs less than optimal choices for a linux system.

When you buy a component for a linux system, it’s always a good idea to look for linux support from the manufacturer. That doesn’t mean that the component will work in every case, but there’s a much better chance that it will.

That’s why I bought/installed four SysKonnect NICs for/in linux systems, and as a “reward” to the company for supplying linux drivers. It was SysKonnect that provided the original linux drivers that worked for most of the initial gigabit NICs. BTW, the driver SK98lin really stands for “SysKonnect 98-series Linux).

Always try to spend your hardware money with manufacturers that provide linux support, even if the component is going in a windows system. If we don’t support them by buying their products, then they won’t support us by providing linux drivers.