Upon boot, my newly installed SUSE 9.1 professional linux looks for my ethernet card in a PCI slot, and it fails because my Broadcom Corp NetXtreme 57xx Gigabit Controller is integrated with the motherboard (it's not in a PCI slot).

Consequenly, I cannot connect to the internet. I've specified all the correct info for my IP address, etc, but without linux knowing the correct location of my card, I can't even ping myself.

Poking around on the web (using a *different* computer! ), I get the sense that I can modify my kernel.config file to look for the correct driver, but kernel.config doesn't seem to exist where it's supposed to be in /usr/src/linux (I have no linux subdirectory there).

Can anyone help me figure out how to get linux to recognize my network card?

PS, I'm a bit of a so please be gentle. Thanks in advance.

wether the NIC is actually a PCI card or bulti into the mobo, it will still technically be on the PCI bus. linux will not look for the NIC in any place in particular, so it's not a matter of where the card is.

Basically IF you have the correct driver on your system (and being a gigabit NIC, i woulnd't be that confident actually, but i don't actually know either way) then running "modprobe modulename" will find the card if it's ever going to be findable.

if you have no /usr/src/linux directory, then you have no kernel source package installed. it's not normally installed by default, but is on your cd's if you need it.

Many thanks for your insight kewpie. Sorry to be thick, but what do I use as 'modulename'?

Since my last post, I discovered that the driver for my Broadband NIC definitely isn't present, but found the driver on the web. In attempting to install it, I realized that my installation of linux didn't have 'make' (which was required to use rpm to install my driver). So I installed make, only to get an error "No rule to make target 'modules'." I'll have to figure out what's wrong with 'make' before I can get this driver to install properly...

Incidentally, I guess I'll install a kernel. Any idea how to choose between the options: kernel-default, kernel-bigsmp, kernel-smp, kernel-source (the first 3 are all described by yast as 'the standard kernel').

And are there any other obvious packages I should install at this point that aren't installed by suse by default but which I'll likely be needing for basic usage?

Many thanks.

the only thing you need (and the bit i can't tell you) is the module name (the driver name basically) i would expect it to be supported, but i have zero experience with gigabit ethernet. it *might* be the sk98lin module, but i couldn't be sure. you will not require any other software to be installed though. it's not an educated suggestion, but it won't hurt to just try all the drivers in /lib/modules/[kernel version]/kernel/drivers/net/ but googel should be able to help. remember that the chipset is much more important than the model of the card, if you appreciate the difference, so i'd look for the lspci output primarily.

i would leave those kernels alone for now too. if you wanted to compile on, you'd want the kernel-source one. the default will already be runnign i assume, and the other two are built for multi-cpu systems.

The solution is posted in this thread

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...10#post1269510