Okay, so this is probably a hot topic, but here are the specifics to my particular conundrum.

I have a Dell Dimension 4100 onto which I loaded RedHat 8.0

I bought a 10/100 Ethernet card, from some so-called Genesis systems or something (ebay cheapo).

Well, I can't get it to install for the life of me as the code for the install programs won't compile. Lovely.

So, the QUESTION:

What is a good Ethernet card to get for RedHat 8.0 on a Dell 4100?

TIA!

glyndwr; check out http://tldp.org/HOWTO/HARDWARE-HOWTO/index.html
for network adapters,modemsand wireless for compatibility,supported/nonsupported.

What is the exact model name of the Network card ?
A pre-compiled module may be available.

As for other types of NICs, I never had any problems with 3Com or Realtek.
Actually, I am surprised that your card is not being detected especially if it is an old card (is it old ?)

I bought a

3Com 3C905-TX 10/100 and took out the crappy one.

Red Hat 8.0 found the device the first boot and it was OK. I went into "Network Configuration" and all I get is a "Cannot activate network device eth0"


I'm getting a little miffed at Linux here...I can see why Windows is so appealing

glyndwr; am newbie too! do not despair. yes it is bit complex but better than W. trust me been there done that and here i am. with linux still learning. am 73 young. best advice is read, research, reread everything to
comprehend, know and do. am doing,reading,comprehending and knowing
now.

glyndwr - I've got pretty much the same kind of card. Open up a terminal session and then run the lsmod command. That will list the kernel modules you've got running. The one you want to see listed will be 3c59x. If it's not there, then run the command: modprobe 3c59x

That should install the module. Rerun lsmod to confirm that it's there. Assuming it is, then next, you want to make sure your network connection is alive. Run the following commands in order
The first step will show you your network parameters. You should see an IP address (probably starting with 192.168.xxx.xxx but maybe not). The second and third steps will bring down and then bring back up the network interface.

I can't say for sure if that will solve the problem but if all goes well, you'll be golden. Good luck with it. -- J.W.

Those commands worked in Terminal and I had no problems. However, when I try to connect to the Internet, nothign works. I try the Internet Configuration tool in RedHat and it fails to Activate the Network Device....

... very confused. Is there something else that needs to be done to get Red Hat to recognize there's a card and activate it ?

If everything seemed to work in the terminal session, then you should be good to go. As a final step, after you've confirmed that eth0 is up and running, try pinging a well-known site, eg: ping www.google.com

If you get a positive response back, then you're connected, and you should be able to just open up a browser and start surfing. If it doesn't work, then please post the exact commands you are running and the exact error messages you are getting. -- J.W.

OK, here's what I did:

moprobe 3c59x

lsmod [shows it unused]

ifconfig [and it gave me 127.0.0.1 for an IP address, and Mask: 255.0.0.0]

ifconfig eth0 down

ifconfig eth0 up

lsmod [no longer unused]

ping www.google.com

"unknown host www.google.com"

Hmm - do you have an onboard LAN port? If so, that may be at eth0, so try the same thing with eth1. 127.0.0.1 is a dummy address (also known as the the loopback interface) and it points back to the machine itself.

If that fails to produce results, then I'm afraid I don't have any other suggestions to try, as what I've described has always solved this problem for me. As an extreme option, you could always consider upgrading to Redhat 9 or Fedora, or possibly another distro (Redhat 8 was released sometime in 2002 if I'm not mistaken and there have been a lot of improvements since then. One good central source for many of the most popular distros is www.linuxiso.org ) Sorry I can't recommend anything better, but good luck with the issue. -- J.W.

The eth0 needs to be configured before you can ping anything.
Are you using DHCP or static IP.

If the output from ifconfig only returns info on lo (one section), then eth0 is not configured.
If you have lo and eth0, then the problem is the configuration.

To configure eth0, take a look at my posts in the following thread.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=201263

It will show you how to manually configure eth0 for DHCP or a static IP (which ever one you need).

I tried your ideas, but that was from Red Hat 9. It did not work on 8.

did you run kudzu?

I ran kudzu from a terminal session and nothing happend. I then went and re-did all the previous steps and nothing.

I do have lo and eth0, but I cannot get eth0 to work.

bump