Hello,

I'm leaping here for some suggestions to get this NIC working in this Dell D620 laptop. Is there a solution? a driver? anything? We are not concerned at this point with the wireless, but the wired is essential.

Dell doesnt have the drivers, and the drivers listed here dont seem to work either. The distro is Red hat Enterprise Linux 4 and i cant see how no one else has this problem; so I'm laghing at myself figuring out if the install of RHEL went bad and didnt detect the card and get it started and working or if there is an additional step necessary to get this working.

I've searched the forums, but it seems most folks are trying to get the wireless working; im not concerned with wireless now.

Details:
Title: Network: Broadcom 57XX Gigabit Integrated Controller,5721C1 NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet PCI-E Driver
Version : A00
OEM name : Broadcom
OEM Version: v8.48e

Any help?

GNY

Do you see it in any of the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth files?(where ? can be 0 or higher depending on the number of NICs)

Do you see it with lspci?

Do you see it if you run "kudzu -sp"?

Do you see any eth? devices when you run ifconfig -a?

1. No

2. yes, as an unknown device

3. yes, as an unknown device 1600 and driver unknown

4. no ethx devices but sit and lo

thanks for the help ..

GNY

Update

when i do modprobe tg3 I get no error. I then try to load eth0: ifconfig eth0 up and i get an error that there is no such device.

Well it seems the driver doesn't recognize the card so ifconfig isn't going to work.

It appears you're using the right driver (tg3) based on Broadcom's site.

Perhaps the NIC itself is defective? I notice they have diag disks available at their site so you might try getting one of those and seeing what it says.

The only box I have (not a laptop) with Broadcom in it shows the following in kudzu -sp output:

class: NETWORK
bus: PCI
detached: 0
device: eth0
driver: tg3
desc: "Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5705_2 Gigabit Ethernet"
network.hwaddr: 00:10:C6:A0:C8:2C
vendorId: 14e4
deviceId: 1654
subVendorId: 1014
subDeviceId: 02d9
pciType: 1
pcidom: 0
pcibus: a
pcidev: b
pcifn: 0

lsmod shows the following for tg3:
tg3 95173 0

/etc/modprobe.conf has the following entry for tg3:
alias eth0 tg3

You may want to make sure you see an alias for tg3 exists. (If you have another card it may not be eth0.)

Hi .. Happy Monday ..

Card not defective as it works on a windows partition; this is a dual boot laptop. I added the alias entry; no success.

I'm kind of left with no other choices as I need an immediate fix; so I'll swap out this laptop with another..

Thanks for the help folks!

Dell supposedly has "linux support". I've never had much luck getting reasonable answers from them but maybe you will since everything you're doing came from Dell.

Yea.. they told me .. "We dont have the dirvers" I asked them whom should I refer to and they say Broadcom. After searcing over and over.. I see that broadcom says we dont know if it will work. RHEL says also see Broadcom ..

unreal experience..

Hello,

I am trying to install Redhat 9 on my year old Dell Latitude D620.
I too am having difficulties getting the Broadcom ethernet card working.

lspci states:
09.00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation: Unknown device 1600 (rev 02)

ifconfig eth0 up states:
eth0: unknown interface: No such device

a ls of /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts yields only:
ifcfg-lo

have you gotten any further in your investigations?

Thanks/Peace,
Daniel

Updating this thread here.. We actually had an IBM server with the same problem here .. another Broadcom card and RHEL4 would not load a working module.. Same exact scenario to my original thread..

Just thought I'd let everyone know that I've fixed this issue by installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Update 4. Simply applied for a trial of the release and installed. the updates stop after 30 days, but at least we are running the latest version and it supports the cards. this box runs on the LAN anyway and is only accessible VIA VPN connection to our corp network.

They are identified as BCM5708, using the bnx2 module/driver. Its very unstable at this point and often seems to just randomly disconnet and not allow you to ssh in for a few seconds and then allows you in. I believe I have read about this same behavior elsewhere, but i cant recall where.

Hope this kind of helps someone.. I will update the thread tags to reflect the new found information.

Thanks for everyones efforts..

i thought broadcom has uploaded the driver in their website
labelled as for linux.
isn't that make things work?

if lspci says 'unknown device' that's the first issue you need to resolve. Download the latest pci.ids file and install it on your system. Once the system can recognize the card, you at least have a chance to get it working..

http://pciids.sourceforge.net/
download the latest pci.ids file and put it in /usr/share/misc/

Now RedHat 9 on the other hand probably will never get that card working because isn't Redhat 9 like dead ? Try a version of Linux that isn't over 5 years old, one that has a current 2.6 kernel and support for newer harware..

RH9 isn't "dead" but certainly is antiquated. After RH9 RedHat diverged into RedHat Enterprise (e.g. RHEL) for commercial use and Fedora Core (FC) for non-commercial. FC is up to version 6 now meaning that RH9 is 6 versions out of date.

Going to at least FC4 would take into the 2.6 kernel that most things are running now thereby increasing the likelihood it has drivers built in for newer technology.

Of course the reverse is true - I had an old Dell PE 6300 that wouldn't load FC6 because they chose to remove the PERC 2 drivers from the 2.6 kernel.

I'm having this same problem with a Dell running FC5. If there is a workaround it would be great to know. I've tried using the src rpm on broadcoms website. It doesn't work. Failes on the rpm build. I'm sure that a simple yum update would fix this, but seeing as I have no ethernet, that would be difficult.

I've seen this same problem on other posts and other sites too. I had the same problem, the "rpmbuild -bb" step supplied in the README.txt file in the driver files from the broadcom website did not work for me at first. I found the real issue was that the spec was looking for bzip2 in the wrong place. I added a soft link and it worked fine.

# ln -s /bin/bzip2 /usr/bin/bzip2
# rpmbuild -bb /usr/src/rpm/SPECS/tg3.spec

I was using Ubuntu 7.10, but if you're using something else you need to figure out where your bzip2 lives ("which bzip2" worked for me) and link it to /usr/bin/bzip2