Hi all,

I have a new PC which Slackware has detected has a Broadcom 5755 ethernet card inside it. Although Slackware will recognise the device it will not allow me to use it. I think this is because the driver is not installed for it. My question is how can I get this card to work? I know I can get the proprietry drivers from the Broadcom website, but I'd rather use open source ones. Does anyone know if there is a kernel config option that I can switch on to include a driver for this ethernet card? I have to use the 2.6.20 kernel (for other reasons).

Thanks,

Steve

Is the broadcom card a wired or wireless card?
Is the appropriate module loaded?

lsmod (or lsmod | grep Broadcom)

I have a Broadcom wireless and have never gotten it to work. I have to use ndiswrapper with the closed source driver form Broadocm. Mine is a 43xx though...

Hi Matty,

It's a wired card and I found when I re-compiled my kernel for single core mode not SMP then the ethernet card starts working! As soon as I compile for SMP the ethernet goes dead. I do not change anything else in the config file! I'm using a Core2Duo E6300 and a 2.6.20 kernel.

Has anyone else seen this kind of problem?

Steve

That does seem weird.

What is the output of lsmod when you are running the SMP kernel?

There's no driver inserted when I try lsmod. When I look at lspci however I do get the device listed as a Broadcom 5755! Linux does seem to know what the card is, it just can't load the driver for it for some reason.

Hi,

I think that the driver module name of Broadcom 5755 is "tg3".
Please try to check your loaded module by " lsmod |grep tg3".

Hi again,

I've tried the grep command and the module is loaded - I get

tg3 104708 0

So I take it the driver is loaded, but why would it not work? It's not that there is no traffic going over the card, but that there is no power going to the card! There are no lights on on the back of the card to signify traffic/power and the hub that I have the card connected to does not have a light on on the port on which it is plugged in.

Thanks

Steve

Hi again,

I've managed to get my ethernet card recognised by using the command "ifconfig eth0 up". However I do not get an IP address for the card so I still can't be seen from the outside world! How can I get an IP address for this card?

Thanks,

Steve

To get an IP from a DHCP server (your ISP):

That works!

Thanks Mattydee

Cool.

That should be taken care of in rc.inet1.( <- I think)
Seems odd that you would have to do this manually...

did you try

dhcpcd eth0

assuming your connection is DHCP