Hi there,

in an attempt to learn linux better, i have decided to switch from slackware to gentoo. this may be insanity as my linux knowledge is at best limited.

I have managed to install the system from a stage 1 tarball (took 6 hours) and configure grub sucessfully to dual boot Gentoo and Linux.

however i think i have made a mistake somewhere in the installation because al though it boots into gentoo fine, the network card isn't getting detected.

from advice and suggestions that i have heard so far it seems that the required module wasn't compiled into the kernel.

my question therefore is can someone explain to me how to compile the module for the rtk 8139 card into the kernel?

thanks
Mike

In menuconfig, go to:

Network device support
Ethernet (10 or 100Mbit) --->
<M> RealTek RTL-8139 PCI Fast Ethernet Adapter support

Save and recompile. Don't forget to load the module.

Thanks for your help

added the realtek driver into the menuconfig

then run
make dep && (etc)
and copied it to /boot

however it's still not working

did you load the module or put it in the autoload file?

modprobe <module you compiled>

You also have to re-boot to use the new kernel

Final network config

ok, here is how limited my knowledge is....

i ran make menuconfig
added the module above

then compiled the kernel like so
make dep && make clean bzImage modules modules_install

then copied it to boot with
cp /usr/src/linux/arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot

I thought coping it to boot would load the module? am getting the feeling that i am very wrong here!

could you explaine to me how to load the module?

thanks for all your help

Modules are pieces of the kernel that can be load and unloaded as you wish. What you copied to /boot is the bare kernel with no modules. If you compile something as a module, you must tell the system to load that module in order to use it.

Have another read of the kernel compile and final network configuration and you will see what you missed doing.

thanks for all your help so far, installing gentoo may be proving tricky but i'm on a big lerning curve and that is good

i have checked /lib/modules/'kernel version'/kernel/drivers/net/

and all i can see is dummy.o

does this mean that i have messed up when re compiling the kernel?

1. Did you save the new kernel configuration before recompiling? You can always check and see.

cd /usr/src/linux
make menuconfig

If you still have the <M> there, you did.

When you are in the kernel config, the ? key gives a lot of help. Find the name of the module that you compiled using that.

Now command:

modprobe <module you compiled>

to see if you can load that module.

The command:

lsmod

will show loaded modules.

If you can load it, put it in /etc/modules.autoload so that it will be loaded on re-boot.

You could always build it into the kernel with a <y> and avoid loading/unloading the module.

thanks once again for your time

i checked to make sure that the module had been saved and it was

will try finding the name of the module and using mod prob now.

sorry about the delays in my responses but i have to boot into gentoo and windows XP each time

thanks again
Mike

am still getting no joy

the module that i'm trying to load is 8139too

i have run modprobe 8139too with no errors
lsmod showed 8139too

however adding it to /etc/modules.autoload seems to have made no difference

You have the the support for the nic card now, but you still need to configure your networking to use it.

Did you edit your network configuration?

/etc/conf.d/net

Then did you do this?

rc-update add net.eth0 default

Final network configuration

will try that.

sorry for missing the obvious!

3 days sparetime wasted

have given up and gone back to slackware

i REALLY wanted to get Gentoo working, but with my limited spare time i have had to make the decision to give up.

fancypiper thanks for your help. am gutted