I just installed the 2.6.4 kernel and naturally my onboard nForce2 NIC doesn't work and using the tarball doesn't work either. I downloaded the forcedeth_2_6_patch.txt and saved it to /usr/src. I try running the patch command and all it gives me is this:

can't find file to patch at input line 4
Perhaps you used the wrong -p or --strip option?
The text leading up to this was:
--------------------------
|===== drivers/net/forcedeth.c 1.5 vs edited =====
|--- 1.5/drivers/net/forcedeth.c Fri Jan 16 01:47:29 2004
|+++ edited/drivers/net/forcedeth.c Thu Feb 5 01:15:27 2004
--------------------------

what do I need to do to get this to work?

I realize what I did wrong, I was running the patch command while in /usr/src instead of /usr/src/linux. Stupid me..

Hi nirva,
I find it amazing that I (user id nirvanix) just installed the 2.6.4 kernel on the weekend on a Slackware 9.1 with an nForce2 onbaord nic! Well just a neat coincidence I guess.
I didn't have to apply a path to the 2.6.4 kernel as the forcedeth driver is built into the kernel. I just chose it as a module, compiled the kernel, and then load it as a module. Seems to work. Now you've got me wondering, did I miss something, or did you add a path that was already in the kernel?

well I realize now that I didn't have to apply the patch, I just had the other two options checked under the one that allows reveresed engineered drivers to be seen

I pretty much screwed up that install of the kernel so I just deleted it and started over, this time I was able to include the nic drivers right away. I've got pretty much everything going, updated KDE to 3.2 and several other programs configured.