Cable Internet won't work with Suse 9.1 Personal Fresh Install
 

I have a problem. I've had this problem with Debian, as well. When I installed Suse 9.1 Personal on my computer, it says I have no internet. It recognizes my ethernet card, but I cannot get my cable internet working. My system specs are:
AMD Athlon
512 MB RAM
Onboard Sound
NVidia GeForce 4 MX640 (I believe that's what it is)
I believe an onboard 10/100 ethernet card
Cable modem (provided by Charter)
Linksys wireless router (so my brother could use the internet to play xbox live)
Dual boot Windows XP SP 1 and Suse Linux 9.1 Personal

The wierd part was that when I was trying to get Debian to install, I found out that Knoppix 3.6 could connect to the internet. I haven't tried 3.7 yet.

What could I do to have Suse recognize my internet?

Go into YaST, go to Network Devices, then Network card. It should detect your card automatically. If it is already configured, try reconfiguring it. The default settings and SuSE's automatic detections worked fine for me on Comcast. If you need to change something, chances are that you want DHCP, automatically generated (no static IP address). Remember that you are not configuring the cable modem. You are configuring the ethernet card. As long as the cable modem is on and it works (I assume this is true, since Knoppix worked), SuSE doesn't care about any device besides the ethernet card.

I do remember that I had a problem after installing 9.1 in that the ethernet card was configured, but became unconfigured every time I rebooted, requiring me to repeat the above process everytime I booted. Here is the post that gave me the solution to that problem: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ernet+suse+9.1

Hope one of these solutions helps you out!

When selecting how to connect to the internet, choose 'lan' and not 'cable'. Also, you can use your web browser to examine the linksys's setup. 'https://192.168.1.1'. The default password is 'admin' with no username entered. There is a page where you can see if there is a WAN connection, and you can also examine the dhcp client table.

Make sure that the gateway is the linksys router ip address.

You may also want to su to root in the shell and restart the network with 'rcnetwork restart'. Read what is printed and if any of the steps failed.

I tried to reconfigure the network card, that didn't work. DHCP is selected. I tried to restart the network with 'rcnetwork restart', as well. It shut down the network just fine, but this is what I got when it started it up again (or something very similar, everything said done, with the exception of eth0 (DHCP), which said waiting, then at the end, setup complete (or something to that effect):

Setting up network interfaces
lo
lo IP address: 127.0.0.1/0......done
eth0 device: VIA Technologies, Inc VT6102 [Rhine-II] (rev 74)
eth0 configuration: eth-id-00:10:dc:db:f2:b1
eth0 (DHCP)....no IP addresses yet...backgrounding...waiting
Setup complete

Isn't 127.0.0.1 the local IP address? Plus, I opened Konquerer and tried to go to https://192.168.1.1/
and http://192.168.1.1/ to try to configure the router, but it wouldn't make the connection. It seems like Suse did not configure my network card properly, if I can't even access the router's setup utility. Either that, or Suse just hates my router. Maybe that's the problem. I'm going to try it out with Knoppix to see if it can't access the router, as well as what it says my network card is.

The IP address it is looking for is the one that DHCP will assign to it as a "subnet mask." You won't be able to hook up to the network until that is assigned (it will show up near the output you posted in your boot log). It looks like the cable modem is not communicating with the ethernet card.

Something to try: take your router out of the mix. I only have one machine, so my cable modem hooks up directly to the ethernet card. Try setting it up like that and reconfiguring. If it works, then you know the problem is with the router. If not, then it's probably something in SuSE.

I have the same cable router at home. However, I have linux for Amd64 installed, so I can't use the built-in wireless and have it connected using the ethernet port.

Print out the results of 'lsmod' and 'ifconfig'. You may not have the proper driver loaded. Ifconfig will show if you have an internet address assigned for eth0.

You might also try using a fixed address instead of using DHCP. Try 192.186.1.10. The Linksys router assigns dhcp addresses starting at 100, so for fixed address, just pick an address below 100. See if you can ping the router then. This will eliminate any DHCP client problems. If you can communicate with the router then, you can set the gateway to 192.168.1.1, and use the configuration page to get the DNS addresses for internet access.

If knoppix can connect without any user intervention, then you have a standard ethernet/dhcp setup. It sounds to me like your network card is not configured properly (or maybe dhcpcd isn't doing it's job).

Try "lspci". This will give you a little bit of information about all the pci/agp devices on your system. Look for your network card, and then see if you can figure out which module (driver) it requires. Some companies will get their chips from other places. For example, my card is from D-link, but under the skin it is a realtek card. Lspci shows this.

Once you know the correct module to use, input it into YaST.

These are the commands that I have found useful for debugging ethernet/dhcp problems (in no particular order):

ifconfig
ifconfig eth0 up
ifconfig eth0 down
ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.10
route
route -n
route add default gw 192.168.1.1
route del default

ifconfig eth0 down up 192.168.1.10 ; route add default gw 192.168.1.1

This is only the ip address half of coarse. There must be nameserver statements in /etc/resolv.conf which refer to your dns servers before you can use names. The interface must be taken down before it will see any changes to the /etc/resolv.conf file. A new default route must be created after the interface comes back up. For more information:

man resolv.conf
man ifconfig
man route

(or post questions here of course)