is by chance there any knowldgeable folks out there that have a good indepth idea on how mandrake 7.0 air i486 works , i have only 4 problems with it , and the last 3 boards no one seems to want to help , it involves the video with an s3 trio 64+ pci , 2 3com 509 cards andsetting up their io addys also pci ,and a ess1688 pci sound card , i dont believe it would be anything major considering the system is up and running in kde on a p166 with 32mb ram and a 2.5 gig hd

Russ

What are your problems? Are you able to install or there are problems with it?

i have mandrake 7.0 running on a p166 now using the KDE desktop GUI , what i need help with is configging it to understand my 2 3com cards and my s3 trio 64v+ the video i know is going to be a massive problem cause the support is sketchy at best , but also , i have the ess1688 pci sound card ,that to works sorta , only under test in the lothar config pannel , as for the rest no sound at all ,what iam planning , to run is , ip masquerading , samba , apachie , and ftp , maybe andromeda for serving a mp3 stream under php, but for now its a cute box in front of me , and im relying on my windows ME laptop for the net connection , , i have dsl internet and plan to route and host a few things and want the NAT/Firewall protection

Russ

FIrst your NIC: if you don't remember its parameters (like IRQ etc), you need a DOS program from 3Com's website: 3c5x9cfg.exe. You need to disable PNP. Then in Linux it's quite easy:
modprobe 3c509
Usually you need it with parameters, like
modprobe 3c509 io=300 irq=10
Of course, use the values correct in your system.

ok welli sorted all the hash out for the nc cards ,and even reconfigged the bios on 1 of the 3 com cards
her eis what i have

3c900 combo io=6100 irq=10
and
3c900 10baseT (tpo) io=6000 irq=11

when i do the modprobe 3c900 io=6100 irq=10 it replies on the Konsole :can't locate Module 3c900

what did i do wrong?

Russ

also being both 3c900 cards how does it name distinguish , or am i really gonna have to be skilled at writing a new conf.modules in the /etc folder ?


Russ

Maybe try with 3c90x instead of 3c900.

ok now well i modded the conf.modules to give each card its respective hardware addy's , now when lothar is brought up it gives a -1 for allthe settings , and when a modprobe is done it says device busy , what could be causing the cards to hang?, this is getting a bit frustrating , without dumpin the whole system and restarting from scratch is ther anyhting possible i can do to manually free the cards and modprobe them from Konsole ?
Russ

Use
cat /proc/modules
to list currently loaded modules and
rmmod modulename
to remove unwanted ones. Then load them again with right parameters.