DSL not detecting NIC

opto · 03-25-2007, 09:44 PM

I've been running Dams Small Linux Live CD for some time now and decided to install it on my hard drive. I found an old Dell desktop and thought Damn Small Linux would be perfect for it. Some of the Dell hardware are the following:

Pentium III 448MHz
20G Hard drive (just found it today and swapped it)
256MB of RAM
I am currently have a DSL internet connection and connecting though a router via ethernet.

When I use the live CD everything works fine, but after I installed DSL 3.2 on the hard drive it does not detect my NIC. My NIC is a Star-Tech ST100 ethernet card and worked fine on other Live CDs (Koppix and Slax), and it also worked when I used it with FreeBSD.

When Damn Small Linux boots up (only when it is installed on the hard drive) I get these errors that do not seem right to me.

Code:

Scanning for hard disk partitions & creating /etc/fstab....modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module xfs
modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate minix
modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate hfs

My dmesg does not mention anything about DHCP being configured or my NIC being detected. I did read on the Damn Small Linux Wiki that networking tends to disappear after it installed on the hard drive.

I tried googling but nothing came up that was helpful. I also tried the Netcardconfig tool and got this message:

Code:

No supported network cards found

I tried ifconfig eth0 but to no avail.

Does anybody know why Damn Small Linux will detect my NIC while running from the CD but will not detect my NIC after it is installed on the hard drive? Do you think if I installed "syslinux"*.iso instead of the *.iso it would make a difference (I highly doubt this but I figure it is worth a shot)?

opto · 03-25-2007, 11:37 PM

I saw on the Damn Small Linux forums that other people were having the same problem. Apparently the b44.o module was not letting it detect NICs. You have to install v3.3RC.

Some people did get it to work by copying the b44.o module from previous versions and installing it in v3.2. At the end of the thread they recommended to install v3.3RC. Everything works great but it stills gives me the errors above for some reason. I don't know if the above errors effect the system, but so far everything seems to work flawlessly.

Here is the link to the forum just in case

Jon Briggs · 03-27-2007, 10:06 AM

yeah i found DSL would not detect the nic in my ibm desktop at work. Its a Broadcom gigabit nic.

How do you go about installing drivers in DSL? also i assume DSL is designed to be dynamic with NIC drivers? Because i have it installed on a usb flash drive so i can use it to recover data etc and so will probably use it on various different machines.