Hello...

I have just installed Mandrake 9.2 on my Acer Travelmate 230. On first boot, the line "bringing up eth0" failed but the booting continued. I went to Control Centre, Hardware and saw that the ethernet card is correctly recognised and uses module 8139too. I set a static IP and mask, and the card was restarted by the config tool.

Subsequent boots will be OK on the line "bringing up eth0" yet still I can't ping the notebook from the network, or ping from the notebook to anything but 127.0.0.1 and localhost.

What should I do now?

Regards
Roger
(near newbie)

How does the notebook connect to the rest of the network?

Does the output of the command ifconfig show the correct IP address etc?

I have it connecting through a switch to a couple of other desktops on my home network. It all works fine when running xp on the notebook.

Yes, ifconfig shows the correct address:
inet addr: 192.168.0.9 bcast 192.168.0.255 mask 255.255.255.0
(I don't know enough about tcp/ip to know why bcast is different)

Any ideas on how to proceed now?

Sometimes disabling Plug and Play in the motherboard BIOS will cure network card problems.

You could also try adding noapic option to the bootloader.

What is the error message?

I can disable plug n play in the bios without a problem (later when I get home) and will let you know what happens. I don't understand the next bit about adding "noapic to the bootloader". Can you explain how I go about doing that?

And as far as an error message, there isn't one, it appears to boot fine, the card is listed in Hardware Control Centre, I simply can't ping to or from my network that otherwise is functioning fine. Do you mean the error after issuing the ping command?

Thank you for helping.

Yep

I don't have an option in my bios for disabling plug and play.

On pinging the network I get "destination host unreachable". I can ping localhost OK.

I've also just noticed the next line after "bringing up eth0 [OK]" says
"No connection to start [OK]" (not sure if this is relevant.

Post the output of /sbin/ifconfig -a

eth0
link endcap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:00:E2:9C:46:72
inet addr:192.168.0.9 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask 255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
Interrupt:3 Base address:0x7000

lo
Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask 255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:52 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frames:0
TX packets:52 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:3396 (3.3 Kb) TX bytes:3396 (3.3 Kb)

Hi,

I got a similar problem with mandrake 9.2.

the laptop is a acer 1501, with a gigabit network adapter, which after much research, doesnt work and wont work.

so i got a netgear fa511 pcmcia card, and cant seem to get get it to work.

there is no option to turn off plug and play, the on board card, etc, and when i run the system configurator it only displays the onboard card as eth0 but says its down. if i run the network config, it lets me configure the onboard card but not the pcmcia. but no matter what i do, i cant get the onboard card to accept an ip address.

the bios is crap, with only small amounts of editable options, none of which i feel will be relevent.

if i run a ifconfig, i get and eth1 and lo, but no eth0. in the boot up it recognises eth1, but not eth0, but it wont talk through either adaptor.

anyone got any ideas cos im all out of them.

I used to run one of those nics with mandrake 9.0 and I believe I had to pass "noapic" at boot.
Check /etc/lilo.conf .
This is what the beginning of mine says:

# LILO configuration file
# generated by 'liloconfig'
#
# Start LILO global section
append="hdd=ide-scsi"
boot = /dev/hda
#compact # faster, but won't work on all systems.
prompt
timeout = 300

If I wanted to pass "noapic" I would edit it as follows:

# LILO configuration file
# generated by 'liloconfig'
#
# Start LILO global section
append="hdd=ide-scsi noapic"
boot = /dev/hda
#compact # faster, but won't work on all systems.
prompt
timeout = 300

I would then go sudo and type:

lilo -v

a reboot would then be in order.

If your running grub instead of lilo I don't know the configuration, but I think Mandrake uses lilo by default.


see ya

The answer to my own problem with the network card on my Acer came through changing distribution. I had a couple of linux pros take a look at my machine, they connected with another notebook, looked at the ping packets, and found that there was a bug in the driver. The packets were being sent, could be seen by the other notebook, but weren't getting back to the originating machine. Same thing happened with knoppix. While waiting for a kernel update and new drivers to download, we tried with a fedora rescue install, and straight away were able to ping ok, and then use the network in the usual ways. So I've now put Fedora on my notebook, and all is well.

My expert friends were confident that they could get it working with the kernel update and different driver, but that was well beyond what I was capable of doing.

Roger