I installed Debian 3.0 Woody with the bf24 option for kernel 2.4, but the sis900.o ethernet driver I need appears to be missing (I see it in the standard kernel 2.2 set, though), making for a rather dead-in-the-water system. Is there some extended module set I need to install, or do I have to resort to the unthinkable - recompile a kernel? If so (yikes, that's so 1995!), is there a way I can do it the Debian Way so I don't flip the package manager the bird? Thanks!

hmm also using a 2.4 kernel but my sis900 works fine strange its in the normal driver package of 2.4 :O

I had a look and it seems sis900 is compiled in directly rather than as a module, which is why I couldn't find it, and I assumed it wasn't present at all as it wasn't working, and it did exist as a module in the 2.2 install. Thanks for the sanity check. It was working in RedHat 7.3 (migrating away from RedHat), it works in Knoppix 3.2, and in XP. I checked dmesg and I'm seeing:

sis900.c: v1.08.02 11/30/2001
eth0: Error EERPOM read ffff

(no, it's actually spelling it EERPOM ). Not sure why it fails with Woody when it's working with everything else; I'll look into it further from this perspective.

maybe you did not configure your eth0 card right ?

Figured it out from some Googling for 'EERPOM'; it's a bug in Linux 2.4.18. I took sis900.{c,h} from 2.4.22, reversed the 1.21 patch to sis900.c (changed the crc32 code to use library code that doesn't exist in 2.4.18, grr), rebuilt the Debian kernel source (make-kpkg), and it came up with no further trouble.

I am attempting to install debian and am running into the same problem. However, I am not familiar with the procedures of reversing the patch as you mentioned here. Can you provide more detail, or is there a reference or howto somewhere I could find this information.