Hi,

I have been having a rather odd problem with getting the needed dhcp information from my linksys router. I know the dhcp works since it's worked in windows and red hat and the other two machines are working (that don't run Slackware).

When my machine boots up, Slackware's scripts work find and detect my ethernet card, but when it tries to run the dhcpcd executable it spits out a timeout error message (after about a minute) then proceeds with the rest of the startup.

When I first boot into my system, I have no Internet access (since dhcpcd didn't work properly). BUT, if I run dhcpcd after logging in everything works just fine. I tried editing the startup scripts (specifically rc.inetd1), but I still had the same problem. But, if I edit rc.local (which is the last rc script to be called) and execute the dhcpcd client from their, the system works just great.

So, I guess that there is something that is not getting called before the dhcpcd line in /etc/rc.d/rc.inetd. Is there some program that dhcpcd depends on to run?

Do you have an idea?

After doing some googling through the linux-kernel mailing lists, I think that the problem is that the 2.4.4 kernel (the one I installed Slackware with) has some issues with the Realtek 8139 8139too module. The people in the mailing list reported that using the 8139too.c from an earlier kernel in the 2.4.4 kernel worked.

So, I guess I'll go ahead and re-install Slackware with an earlier kernel, and hoping that works, I'll upgrade the kernel later on if I need to.

Yes!!!!

It worked. I'm now running Slackware 8.0 with kernel 2.2.19.

If there were something deranged with the module, and I'm not doubting there was as the Realtek 8139 chipset has been through a few too hundred many revisions, thus the poor driver maintainer, Jeff Garzik, has to keep re-hacking that thing every few weeks; but it just probably wouldn't have worked after the rest of init had run. It was probably something doinky with how Slack auto-probed and set-up rc.inet1. When in doubt in the future, you can always ghetto-riffically hack the /sbin/dhcpcd ethX line into rc.local, which is the very last thing run by init... so it would be the same as entering it first on the command line.

Oh, and Slack 8 shipped with 2.2.19 and 2.4.5. Honestly, to take advantage of some really neat new stuff, you may want to download the newest kernel and play with that: 2.4.17. Slack 8 handles it well... that's the set-up I'm typing on right now.

Cheers,

Finegan