Hi, all.

I hope this is the right forum - Should this go in Slackware instead? (*Newbie alert, BTW)

I'm trying to set up a firewall/router using Slackware 8.1 running on (Specs shown below), but having trouble setting up the NIC. The hardware all played together before running Win95, and evn comes OK booting a Coyote floppy.
I've got most of <a> installed, the man pages from <ap>, and the parts of <n> that looked like what I needed. I think I found the right driver (8139too) for the NIC, but I'm getting errors (shown below) from modprobe. Going through the output of dmesg, I saw a complaint about the PCI bus (snip shown below). I've tried futzing with different CMOS settings, but still get the same results. When I look at the interrupts used (also shown below), I don't see anything showing up for the PCI NIC. Did I miss something in the install or setup for the PCI bus? Any ideas?

Specs:
AMD 486 DX4-100
DFI G486-VPA Motherboard
Award BIOS v4.50PG
16MB RAM
Maxtor 500MB (IDE)
NEC CDROM (IDE)
3.5" floppy
Monochrome (TTL) Monitor
MDA video adapter (ISA)
Mouse: 2 button serial
Realtek (Brand X) 8139 NIC (PCI)
Sound: No
Slackware 8.1
*Notes: old IDE, NOT EIDE

modprobe 8139too:
Module dependencies up to date (no new kernel modules found).
/lib/modules/2.4.18/kernel/drivers/net/8139too.o.gz: init_module: No such device
/lib/modules/2.4.18/kernel/drivers/net/8139too.o.gz: Hint: insmod errors can be caused by incorrect module parameters, including invalid IO or IRQ parameters.
You may find more information in syslog or the output from dmesg
/lib/modules/2.4.18/kernel/drivers/net/8139too.o.gz: insmod /lib/modules/2.4.18/kernel/drivers/net/8139too.o.gz failed
/lib/modules/2.4.18/kernel/drivers/net/8139too.o.gz: insmod 8139too failed

dmesg:
<SNIP>
PCI: PCI BIOS revision 2.10 entry at 0xfbd80, last bus=0
PCI: System does not support PCI
<SNIP>

cat /proc/interrupts:
CPU0
0: 24816 XT-PIC timer
1: 932 XT-PIC keyboard
2: 0 XT-PIC cascade
4: 7 XT-PIC serial
8: 1 XT-PIC rtc
13: 0 XT-PIC fpu
14: 16809 XT-PIC ide0
NMI: 0
ERR: 0

Can mean that the driver you loaded doesn't work with your card. I think there is another 8139 module you can try.

As for PCI bus, if its a 486 it may need a custom kernel for your pci chipset or a special paramater passed to the kernel to get the PCI bus to work. Are there any other PCI cards that are working in the system, or even onboard IDE or USB since those are usually on the PCI bus too.

For custom kernel, search this site, tons of threads on kernel compiling including slack specific threads. Or check out www.tldp.org.

PS this forum is fine, your dealing with hardware and kernel modules which are going to have the same issues even on different distros.

Thanks, Darin.

After snooping around here a little more I found the "lspci" command, which tells me that indeed that's where the problem is. Funny that the IDE devices come up fine.

I don't know if I'm ready for compling a kernel yet - need to get my sea legs first (been about 12 years since I had a shell prompt in front of me). Guess I'll start with looking for options I can pass the kernel - maybe try to install "current", but I doubt anything would change there. I wonder what's in the Coyote kernel that makes the PCI bus come alive?

So much to learn . . . Having fun so far though - be spending lots of time here snooping around.
:-)

There have been a bunch of realtek IDs added since 2.4.18 came out a year ago. You might want to grab the .tgz of 2.4.19 from slackware under patches/packages as Patrick released an updated kernel for 8.1, that might knock it out without you having to go and compile 2.4.20 by hand.

Cheers,

Finegan

Well it's Slack, maybe read through the descriptions for the various kernels on the CD and see if one may cover your old PCI bus (probably not but worth a try though.)

Usually with old hardware if it's no longer enabled in x kernel version then you would have to look at older distros, not newer ones, to find one with support compiled in. That means current probably won't help you but if you found an older version maybe?

If your willing to take a crack at the kernel stuff you can cp /boot/config /usr/src/linux/.config then when you make menuconfig (or make xconfig) all the options will match what the current kernel uses so as long as you don't take out anything crucial it should work. This lets you go in and add in support for your older chipset.

As for IDE working, it's possible that the really old boards like your 486 one have IDE on the VLB or even the 16bit ISA bus instead of the PCI bus.

Thanks, Darin. I took a look in the /boot/config file, and I see a couple of clues, but mostly I just don't know what I'm looking at yet. It's been eons since I messed with a make file, so I think I'll hold off on trying to build a kernel for now. I like your suggestion about trying an older distro - this box is pretty bare bones. I took another look on the CD too, but "bare.i" is the only kernel that made any sense to me - maybe I'll find somehting back at the Slack site. Back to the books for me and do some reading . . .
Thanks for your help.