Hi,

currently I'm working on a small project for my study. It's installing CentOS 4.4 systems with the PXE boot.

No all goes fine untill I'm in the installation, it cant find the network card drivers... so the kickstart stops.

No I've found out that I will need a installation that will support the forcedeth.ko module so my network card can work properly.

This must be compiled in the CentOS installation kernel... Is there any way i can do this in the append line or in the kickstart file?

Do you guys know if there is any custom CentOS installation with this module, I know that there is one for debian but I've not found any for CentOS...

Or do I have to build it myself and if so how...

thnx alot!

PS: I'm using the following mainboard:
MSI C51G + MCP51G Chipset Based
K8NGM-V

Network card: Realtek 8201CL

Ow forgot to tell you guys this:

the Forcedeth source can be found here:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_nforce_1.11.html

So as I'm searching on I just realised that it should be possible to ad modprobe to the append line ...

You will get something like this:

label centos
kernel ./centos/4/vmlinuz
append initrd=./centos/4/initrd.img device=eth ip=dhcp modprobe=forcedeth

Maybe you guys could tell me if it will work or not, and I'm not sure about one thing, the were would he get his forcedeth driver from...

I'm waiting on your answer and reading on

forcedeth has been part of the stock default kernel for about 2 years now. there's nothing interesting about it at all really. infact i didn't think nvidia had anything to do with it at all, and i'm guessing they are simply promoting someone else's kernel code as their own nvnet driver always sucked.

if you're looking to include the forcedeth module within the kernel itself then it'd be a pretty stock rebuild of the standard centos 4.4 kernel, but you'd just toggle the forcedeth options from a module to compiled. that will then recreate exactly the same kernel but including forcedeth. another option is to use an initrd to contain the forcedeth module and leave the original kernel in tact. the pxe / tftp boot process will pull an initrd as well as a kernel image is requested to do so i believe.

Hi Chris,

thank you for your reaction!

But if the forcedeth module is in the standard "installation kernel" that is used by anaconda etc. to install CentOS 4.4 on the system why is my network card not supported during the installation, Realtek 8201CL ... ?

So I assume that what you are telling me is true, my append rule must work then:
Can you verify if this would work?

Thank you!

well no i don't believe that's at all possible. when a nic driver is in the kernel itself then it's automatically loaded, so no modprobe etc... is needed. if you're booting over px then the modules filesystem is not available, and so you can't reach the driver to load it anyway, and if you could reach the driver then you could also reach /etc presumably so would just load the nic driver as part of the standard boot process with modprobe.conf.

whenever i've done PXE, well, THE time i did PXE, i rebuilt the kernel for simplicity in the long run and it worked really well.

Did you compile the kernel afther the ionstallation or did you compile the kernel before the installation and used it in the installation?

If it is the last one please tell me how or tell me if you have the kernel images somewere available.

i did it before, but this was with gentoo and a ne2k card...

Hi, just letting you know, I've got it working using the modprobe