I have been learning as much as I can about Linux for a while and I love it. Just bought a new computer with the following hardware:

AMD Athlon 64 2800+
Leadtek NVidia FX5700Ultra 128MB GDDR3
Western Digital 80GB 7200RPM HD
512MB Geil Value Series DDR
Abit K8T800 uGuru mobo
3Com Ethernet adapter

And everything works fabulous. Except I can't connect to the internet with Mandrake 9.2 or 10.0. There is a specific driver for my ethernet card in Mandrake, and it finds it, and assigns eth0 to the card. But it cannot obtain an IP address from my network. We have a high speed network (not DSL, a partial T1, we live in BFE), that gets a peak of 390k/s if the banwidth is open. Again, Linux finds the card, it just can't obtain an IP. I went through the setup and that did not help. I must mention that it worked perfectly on my previous computer, using the same ethernet card, in Mandrake 9.2. But on my old computer, Mandrake 10.0 gave me the exact same problem. I am lost and hoping someone can assist. If you need any more details I am more than happy to submit.

Regards, and I appreciate the time you have taken to read this!

Use a dos boot disk and the 3com configuration program, set the nic to fixed lan speed, in fact nothing on auto
In linux disable kudzu at boot up ( you use kudzu to discover new hardware )

Do you mean put the 3Com install program on a dos disk then run it in Mandrake?
Cause that won't work its a 8.7 MB program

I've been unable to get my 3Com ADSL NIC to work as well

I will elaborate, there is a problem with 3com cards, kudzu messes up the settings from a 3com card.
The only way to fix it is
1)
disable kudzu on linux
2)
boot dos from a diskette and use the program 3c90xcfg to change the setting on the nic.

Now the nic will be able to receive dhcp information from your router/modem

download 3c90xcfg.exe
http://www.southplainscollege.edu/pub/win98/3c90x/

thank you! i will try that. how do i disable kudzu? do you do that on install ?

Thanks for the elaboration...this won't work for me though, I don't have a 3c90x NIC
mine is a 3Com ADSL PCI lan/rfc1483 aka 3cp3617 , its identified by Mandrake as a idt77252 an aparent refrence to the onboard controller chip

In the modules folder theres a module called "idt77252.o.gz" which I think is the the driver for my NIC
do you know how to get Mandrake to try and use it?

It's a zipped file, use
gunzip idt77252.o.gz
to unzip it


copy the file

cp idt77252.o /lib/modules/type here the kernelversion/kernel/drivers/net/idt77252.o


now load it into the kernel
insmod idt77252.o

have a look with
dmesg what happened

and post your result

the output from dmesg says:
idt77252: Unknown symbol atm_pcr_goal
idt77252: Unknown symbol suni_init
idt77252: Unknown symbol atm_dev_deregister
idt77252: Unknown symbol atm_dev_register
idt77252: Unknown symbol atm_charge

modprobe just says module not found

I found this :http://seclists.org/lists/linux-kernel/2004/Aug/0893.html

I' m not sure what to make of it, but it looks like their trying to solve or have solved the problem I'm having