for some reason my linux doesn't want to recognize my onboard lan. used to be a dual boot with win2kpro/rh9, and it worked fine in windows. but now windows is gone, and so I can't use it at all because...i don't have an internet connection. running on a msi k7n2 delta ilsr mainboard (nforce2 chipset). i've tried all sorts of driver rpms, and none of them work. they install, but redhat simply refuses to recognize the device. i found a couple threads from people with similar problems but nothing informative. any ideas?

id like to know too, i have nforce2 & mandrake 9.2 and no ethernet
worky

I build the drivers from source and I have never had any problems whatsoever with it. Justs modprobe nvnet and you're all set.

Håkan

i dont know how to build a driver from source. and what you mean by modprobe nvnet

Hi folks,
Have the same nforce2 board... running Mandrake 9.1 on it. With Mandrake, the solve is that you have to first use the networking wizard... most of the time, this will crash or not save the values. But try it anyway
Following this, use the following commands (logged in as su):
ifconfig eth0 192.168.XXX.XXX up
(replace the xxx with your ip address). Type just ifconfig, eth0 will be up.
Unfortunately you have to do this everytime you want eth0 to startup..
Hope that helped.
Regards,
Has

thing is, i dont have an eth0, only a lo

I think pretty much everyone with an NForce2 has this problem

Download and install nVidia's unified driver http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_nforce_1.0-0261 (get the source tarball, not the rpm) and do the following steps:

1) tar -xvfz nforce.tar.gz
2) cd /nforce/nvnet/
3) make && make install

Load up a text editor and open "/etc/modules.conf". Even if the file is empty, add the following line without the quotations: "alias eth0 nvnet" (not sure if this does anything, but you can also add the line "options nvnet optimization = 1")

6) netconfig
7) modprobe nvnet


After this you should be set. If you don't have the nVidia unified driver installed, go ahead and do that too (from either the source you have downloaded or the rpm if you feel better about it).

1) tar: z: Cannot open: No such file or directory
tar: Error is not reoverable: exiting now
2) and to get that i type
tar -xvfz NVIDIA_nforce-1.0-0261.tar.gz

3) there is no /nforce/nvnet directory

4)can you please give this to me in english? im one of those dumb noobs

Don't use the hyphen, only type tar xfvz NVIDIA_nforce-1.0-0261.tar.gz and it should extract OK. After that you can follow the instructions Darktyco provided.

Håkan

Thanks hw-tph, I'll try it later today (right now I have to go to school), but I've tried probing it several times and nothing's worked. Is there any reason building the driver from source will change that? (This is an honest question, I'd like to know how that works...)

I use Debian, and there are no ready-to-run drivers for my distribution. Furthermore, I build my own kernel to be able to keep it as small as possible (not much reason to do that actually, considering the amount of memory in current PC's) and to add a few patches.

Now, drivers are built against a certain revision and build of a kernel. So if you try the pre-built (rpm) driver intended for use with SuSE on a RedHat machine, it will probably not work since they use different kernels. Most distributions add quite a few patches to the kernel while an unpatched kernel is often referred to as "plain vanilla" . Since I have built my own kernel there are no ready-to-run driver packages for me.

If you install the kernel source from your distribution CD you will probably get a nice, preconfigured kernel sourcetree against which you can build the driver module.

Hope that helps a little bit.

Håkan

hi-tph, ty for your help. ima get to it when i get home tonight

Oops, sorry about the hyphen

ok, i got to the part 3) make && make install

It does something, errors pop up, there are wayyyy to many to type out here... and i cant cut n paste because i still cant write to my floppy drive (Writing to Devices is NOT supported is the error)

then I do "netconfig" and says command not found

and "modprobe nvnet" says Can't locate module nvnet

Try running them seperatly so we can at least see where its coming from:

make
make install

Make sure you are logged in as a super user when you run make install. Which one does it error out on?