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EDIT: Ok, the problem is technically solved, although I have no idea WHY it's working now.

Basically I did a complete reinstall a few times, and would get varying results, but mostly failure.

The last time I did a reinstall, I tried to configure the SMC-Ultra card manually, giving specific IRQ and IO values. I tried combinations with IRQ 9 and 10, and IO 0x240 and 0x2A0. All of them would fail. So in frustration I went back and let it autoprobe as I'd done every time before (which would result in the problems I described below).

Except this time, it everything worked fine. I don't know why, and I am sure this isn't the correct explanation, but apparently during the installation phase, I would specifically have to try and manually set the IO and IRQ values, knowing full well that it won't work, before allowing it to autoprobe. If I simply autoprobed without trying the manual settings, I would have the problem described below.

Weird.... but I'm writing this from Linux, so I'm happy!
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Ok all, it's been a LONG time since I've been able to tinker with Linux.

Have an older PC, set it up for W98/Linux dual boot. Everything works right in Windows.

It has 2 ethernet cards, which may or may not be significant, as I use this machine for NAT.

Anyway, did an installation of Mandrake 10.2, and all seemed to go well. One of my ethernet cards (3Com 905-type PCI) automatically installed, and I set that up for my LAN, and I have an SMC EtherEZ (smc-ultra driver) that had to be set up by choosing a driver manually. It's an ISA, but is PnP. However, since I didn't know that during installation, I had to set up the SMC card through harddrake2.

So I've got FVMW2 installed, and all seems to be working well. I get on the net, got a few things working, etc.

Next day, I go to boot up, and anytime I type "xinit" at the prompt to go into X, the screen goes blank and the computer hard-locks. I can't switch to another console, I can't CTRL-ALT-DEL, nothing. Just have to hit the reset or the power button.

Couldn't figure it out, so I just did a wipe-reinstall.

This time, knowing what the SMC card was, I set things up during installation.

Everything goes well, I get things going, and have ZERO net access.

Hmm, harddrake seems unaware of my 2nd ethernet card. Set it up, restart fvwm2, and still, no access. Every time I do it, it spit out something on the command line about SIO-something or other, operation not supported. But then it brings down eth0, then brings back up eth0 and eth1 and says OK next to each.

Nothing I do can get eth1 going until I reboot the system. Ahh . . now from the command line, I can ping other sites, etc.

Groovy, so I type xinit

And the hard-lock comes back.


I'm sort of stumped at even where to begin with this. If it matters, the videocard is an OEM Radeon 7500 AGP, and I'm using the Radeon with 3D acceleration version of XFree86.

I wanted to try and disable eth1 manually, except that I don't know how to do it. I obviously can't go into harddrake2 to look at the configuration because I can't start X.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Did a bit more testing.... it seems that X is defiitely not happy about something with the network cards!

I tried just booting (I boot to command line, not gui), and can ping both my lan (goes thru the 3Com PCI card) and the outside world (thru the SMC EtherEZ ISA card).

If I do:

/etc/rc.d/init.d/network stop

I can then do xinit and all works harmoniously, except for the fact, of course, that I can't get on the internet in any way shape or form.

If I do:

/etc/rc.d/init.d/network start

from either the command line or from within an xterm once I have X going, I get the messages that the interfaces are coming up, but I still can't get to the outside world.

I have a cablemodem and the service uses DHCP, if that's significant.

Interestingly, *sometimes* if I do the network stop after I've started X, it only brings the lo and eth0 interfaces down, not eth1. Start always claims it brings all 3 (lo, eth0, and eth1) successfully.

So it looks like I can get to the internet and only use the command-line, or I can have a GUI but no internet access.


I know the *obvious* solution is probably to just try a different ethernet card for what I use to connect to the cablemodem, but it just strikes me as kinda weird that I can't use this card.

Anyone run into this sort of thing before? Any other information I should get from my system that could be helpful?

I don't recall running into this issue with Mandrake 9.1, but I think I had a different videocard at that time. Still was an AGP ATI card though, but it was a Rage128 rather than a Radeon.