I hope someone can help me figure out why my ethernet card works with Windows 2000 but not with Linux.

I have Windows 2000 and Linux (SuSE 7.1) installed on separate disks. The mainboard is a PC Chips M810LMR with a built-in NIC. Win2K identifies the NIC as a SiS900 and everything works fine on my home network for both Windows and IP networking. Here's the output from ipconfig /all :

Windows 2000 IP Configuration

Host Name . . . . . . . . . . . . : holly
Primary DNS Suffix . . . . . . . :
Node Type . . . . . . . . . . . . : Broadcast
IP Routing Enabled. . . . . . . . : No
WINS Proxy Enabled. . . . . . . . : No

Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :
Description . . . . . . . . . . . : SiS 900 PCI Fast Ethernet Adapter
Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00-D0-09-D3-E5-80
DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : No
IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 193.1.1.1
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . :
DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . :

Linux (kernel 2.2.18) identifies the same NIC as a RealTek 8139 and lsmod tells me that the rtl8139 module is loaded. However, I can only ping localhost. Here's the output from ifconfig -a after I've tried to ping the other machine on my home network:

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:00:00:00:00:00
inet addr:193.1.1.1 Bcast:193.1.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:9 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
Interrupt:5 Base address:0xcc00

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:3924 Metric:1
RX packets:13 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:13 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0

I noticed that the hardware address hadn't been identified so I tried setting that manually with ifconfig, but I still didn't get a working network. I've turned off the Plug-n-Play setting in the BIOS. What should I try next?

Stephen

Two things you can try, easy one first:

Replace the card with a known compatible card. Just because a card works under Windows, there is NO guarantee it will work under different OSes.

Second, try a different module. I searched on http://lhd.datapower.com (unofficial linux hardware compatibility site) and the user there said it uses a sis900 module. You can try typing this to check and see what happens:

ifdown <NIC Interface i.e. eth0, eth1, etc>
rmmod rtl8139
modprobe -v -v sis900

If this comes back with no errors, you're good to go. If you get errors on this, verify the module for the card and replace sis900 with the module it's supposed to use.