I bought a strip-down mobo/case kit and built a PC, it's an Athlon XP 1700. The mobo is an ECS L7SOM and has given me troubles under all varieties of linux. I had to build an upgraded kernel (2.4.20) to recognize my PCI bus, but now none of the hardware seems to work. I've added the line
alias 8139too eth0
to /etc/modules.conf and this added the NIC to the Network browser; however, it will not activate.

When I run lsmod I get no entry for 8139too (as a matter of fact, I get no entries at all!); the system hangs during boot for about 3 minutes initializing eth0; when I run modprobe 8139too it responds "no such device"; lspci reports the NIC as "RealTek 8139..".

All the hardware works - it runs with 2K/XP fine. I can't find any other ideas on the forums, so here it is..

Thanks in advance!

.-=Chernobyl=-.

do you think maybe you didn't get your kernel modules
installed
make bzImage
make modules
make modules_install

I'm sure i've installed the modules correctly - I had a problem with my USB so I had to re-make the whole kernel with make xconfig, make dep, etc. etc. It still doesn't work either

Do you have Plug n Play enabled in the BIOS? This often causes problems with Linux installations. Disable it and try again if you do. It sounds like there is something setup wrongly in your BIOS perhaps. You might want to try a fresh install and make sure to setup up for dhcp during the installation. I have set up several ECS boards on AMD XP cpus with no problem finding hardware or setting up networking. NIC's are found and up and running during the installation and first boot. Do you have the latest BIOS, or at least a recent one?

I had a feeling that might be the problem. The issue is, there's no option to disable PnP in the BIOS. There's a PnP/PCI configuration option, but no option to disable that I could find.

It reports "Award Modular BIOS version 6.00PG" on bootup; do I need to flash my BIOS?

Meh. Looks like I had to turn on the "Experimental" option (very first one) to enable the updated rtl8139 called 8139cp --- this one works like a champ, I am using linux to write this!

Thanks for the help though!

Glad you got it working. Usually the BIOS will be fine if it's fairly recent but they often have bugs for things that you have to watch for, flashing the BIOS is a last resort unless there is a known bug that is causing the problem. The mobo manufacturers usually list the BIOS updates and bug fixes. Now that you've got your nic working, your BIOS should be OK. Whenever you get hardware for your linux box, check the HCL from the distro provider to make sure it will work. I saw that the SMC card was not listed at Redhat, but when I saw it was an SMC running the rtl8139 driver, I figured it should work. Have fun.