I have RH Fedora 2.4.24,and am using it on a P4 ASUS motherboard that uses SIS chips with built in ethernet port. It's dual boot system and every thing works in w2k. I have a Netgrear DSL router acting as DHCP sever connectedt to ADSL WAN modem.

I am publishing a new thread beacuse I have now swapped hardware to no avail.

Problem:

1. SIS-900 Ethernet port won't become active- during boot always
failed with:
SIOCSIFFLAGS device or resources busy.
2. After struggling for almost 1 day, I disabled the SIS port on
motherboard and Installed Realtek RTL8139 PCI 10/100 card.

I have exactly the same problem.

I have tried providing fixed IP address and DNS IP's and a hostname.
In both case (SIS and RealTek) the problem is same.

I have installed Fedora 3 times, run system-network .. configuration tool a zillion times and the diag's don't change.
lsmod provides the right driver.
lspci, sees the device

in the system-setting->network module, the hardware shows the card and the status is OK .. in the device tab, the device is inactive ..if you hit the activate button, it comes back with
SIOCSIFFLAGS device or resources busy

dmseg says it found the REALTEK 8139 and the divert_block is not
freed, so driver loaded fine.

lsmod shows 8139too is loaded.

ifconfig -a shows the HW MAC address .. but no IP address for eth0

I think the problem is somewhere in the IP setting, any help will be greatly appreciated

Hello ..
Did U try to force the ip trough ifconfig ??

Ifconfig eth0 down
ifconfig 192.168.0.1 up
ping 192.168.0.1

..
Maybe there is still some traces if you darn SIS900 (very bad chipset)

So what I would do is :

remove ALL NETWORK entries int the
/etc/sysconfig/hwconf
kudzu
netconfig (again)...

Dont give up!

The problem, it appears has to do with PNP settings in the bios.
Disable that .. and everything works normally .. in linux that is.

For a dual boot system that's not so good, you need pnp for w2k.

so this is a partial victory .. I was almost to the point to say hell with it and was ready to make your peace with the other bill that I don't care too much for anymore .. but we will see ..