Hi all
I am having problems with my Realtek network card under a Mandrake 9.0 or 9.1 install. Under both installations the card is recognised however the TX and RX counts remain at 0 and I cannot ping anywhere, not even my router (which is the gateway, with card being directly patched to one of its ports). Are there specific issues with Realtek cards on Mandrake? Do I require a special driver and where would I get this?

Any help is greatly appreciated since I really need to get the PC in question onto the network.

Thanks.

Realtek cards are well supported in linux. Are you using dynamic or static IP addressing? Does the output of /sbin/ifconfig show eth0 as being up?
Post the output.

Are the IP address of the router and PC on the same subnet?

Hi michaelk
Firstly, to provide more info, the card is detected as Realtek|RTL-8139.

I have tried to use both dyanmic and static addressing. With static addressing the interface appears to be up and configured when I boot up (192.168.1.101) however nothing goes out of it - the RX and TX counters just remain at zero.

With dynamic addressing something odd happens - eventhough my router is configured to assign IPs in the pool of 192.168.1.10-50, the card attempts to configure an IP address of 169.254.186.149! And it tries to do that on interface eth0:9 as opposed to eth0? I have no idea why this is happening, as DHCP works completely fine for all my other clients on the subnet. The router and the client are on the same subnet.

I can confirm that there is a link between the PC and the router, as the link light is on. I just do not understand why nothing can be sent out of the interface. ifconfig eth0 shows the interface to be up. Output: (you'll appreciate there's no easy way to copy and paste this since the PC is not on the network, so I'll include the most important output):

inet addr:192.168.1.101 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 - all counters on this line 0
TX packets:0 - all counters on this line 0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
Interrupt:17 Base address:0x7f00

Any ideas?

Hi michaelk and all
I have resolved this problem - and thought I would post my solution just in case other people are having this problem. You need to disable APIC, either in the BIOS or by editing /etc/lilo.conf to specify 'noapic'. APIC, for those who don't know, is a mechanism to allow for the usage of devices above IRQ address 16 - however Linux (or at least Mandrake Linux) does not like it. If you look at my ifconfig output above you will see that the eth0 Interrupt address was 17, it is now 11. That's why I could not send anything from it previously.

Disabling APIC not only enabled my LAN card, but the sound also started to work (which was also not functioning before). Output from my ifconfig is now:

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:20:ED:B3:68:4C
inet addr:192.168.1.101 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:182566 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:129898 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:235721694 (224.8 Mb) TX bytes:12905420 (12.3 Mb)
Interrupt:11 Base address:0x7f00

And I now have a beautiful Mandrake, KDE 3.1 desktop on the network, playing sounds.