NE2000-compatible PCMCIA NIC support in Debian
 

Hi,

I've got a computer with DE-660+ (it's NE2000-compatible) ethernet PCMCIA card and it's so far successfully defied all Debian's (or mine, actually) attempts to detect and configure it. Personally, I'm not familiar with how Debian handles PCMCIA NICs and at the moment I haven't got time to study this in depth, so I'd be very grateful if anyone in this forum has some quick advice that would help me to get this computer connected to network.

I think that the module to be loaded for this NIC is pcnet_cs but 'modprobe pcnet_cs' doesn't seem to work. I've also already configured the address, netmask, and gateway in /etc/network/interfaces but the problem appears to be how I can make Debian to notice my NIC. Any suggestions about what I should do?

PS. It's a recent snapshot Sarge Debian-installer that I'm trying to install on this computer.

Quick howto:
-apt-get install pcmcia-cs pcmcia-modules-yourkernelversion hotplug
-Watch if the syslog has some activity when you plug the card in.
-If no errors occur, you should now have new network device. Try 'ifconfig -a' to see if there is something.

Ahem, seems like I was a bit hasty. Configured manually /etc/network/interfaces & /etc/resolv.conf, did modprobe pcnet_cs and now ifconfig -a shows that eth0 is configured and appears to be working. However, a new problem occurred -- now when doing apt-get update I get the following error message:

E: The method driver /usr/lib/apt/methods/fitp could not be loaded

I haven't stumbled into this kind of error before. Any idea what I should do to fix it?

Does the machine ping? Can you take ssh,ftp or http connections to internet?

If so, what is your /etc/apt/ configurations ok? Is that fitp, or ftp?

LOL, the error message was caused by a typo in /etc/apt/sources.list. I still need to study more the PCMCIA NIC specific configuration options but the network connection now works in this box. Thanks for helpful suggestions! :cool: