Dell Mini 10v installation - how to get eth0 available?
 

Hi. I just bought a Dell Mini 10v. It has Ubuntu on it but I want to put Gentoo on it just the way I like it. I put the 2008 minimal install ISO onto a usb disk using unetbootin, and booted into it on the Mini, ready to go through the installation like I normally would.

However, there is no eth0, only loopback! Ifconfig only shows lo, but no eth*. From googling, i seems that Dell Mini 10v using some kind of non-standard drivers for the ethernet card. (Which would be about the stupid thing I have ever heard of, considering I have 10 year old ethernet cards on my shelf that don't need special drivers... end rant.) I looked at support.dell.com, but the only ethernet card drivers I found were for Windows.

I'm not really sure what to do now - I've never been in this situation before. Every time I've ever installed any distribution, eth0 has always been there automatically for me to configure. I haven't erased the Ubuntu installation yet, so I imagine I can copy the the network drivers off of that installation somehow. But I don't know what I'm looking for.

Well, I have an EeePC 1005, and had a similar problem. What I found was that the Eee had eth0 disabled in the BIOS. Go into your setup and check this out. It's done on netbooks to conserve power.

Thanks for the reply, but I just figured this out on another forum:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t...ighlight-.html