"Interface eth0 does not exist"
 

Hi there!

Just started with LFS 6.1 since i wanted to learn more about the basic linux setup and im loving it this far. But...

My network card isnt found. And it doesnt seem to be because of missing drivers, because i have tried to compile the driver both as module and as part of the kernel.

dmesg says during boot: "forcedeth.c: Reversed Engineered nforce ethernet driver. Version 0.31" which i suppose means that the driver is loaded by the kernel correctly. Im not sure if there is a better way to check if its loaded?

The "Interface eth0 does not exist" keeps popping up at the end of booting up. ifconfig shows only the loopback interface and all attempts to bring up eth0 fails. It doesnt seem to have detected that my network card exist. I read that eth is not supposed to be in /dev (and it isnt), but is there some other way of knowing if the system have even found it?

Anyway, im wondering... if its not a driver issue, what else could it be?

Ok thanks...

Christer, Sweden

Did you compile the right driver into your kernel? If you've installed pciutils, what does lspci say about the card? If you have a linux distro where the card works, what module is listed for the card when you run lsmod?

I installed from the bootcd (lfs 6.1) so i have not tested the network card with linux before. Its a integrated network card on my motherboard (MSI K8N Neo 2 Platinium) and according to a posting on kerneltrap (http://kerneltrap.org/node/4442), at least one of them is supposed to work fine. Ive tried compiling support for both of them into the kernel though, but still eth0 is not found.

Dont have pciutils installed, and lsmod shows nothing, because i currently have the drivers compiled into the kernel.

As i write this, im recompiling the kernel with the drivers as modules instead (to show the lsmod command output)..... i run the make, copy over the kernel and system.map and config, run make modules-install and reboot.

Nothing. lsmod shows an empty list....

Ill try to install pciutils... done.

Ok, lspci shows the ethernet controller as AMD 79c970 [PCnet32 LANCE]. Recompiling kernel with support (as modules) for that one instead...could this be wrong though? pciutils is a little outdated...

Success! eth0 is detected. But how can i be sure that this is the right driver for my card? It could just work as a compatible driver, but not the most optimal one, right? Anyway, im happy... ill play around with it abit more. Thanks for your help!

Christer, Sweden