I just bought an Acer 5672 laptop and installed FC4 on it. After my first real boot my network card is not detected. /sbin/ifconfig only shows the loopback. My question is how to get fedora to detect the ethernet card (I'll worry about the wireless card later).

The system:
Acer Aspire 5672 (1.66MHz Dual processor, 100GB, 512MB Laptop)
Dual boot WinXP, Fedora Core 4 (kernal 2.6.11) <--- side note, what does smp in the kernal mean?
Broadcom BCM5789 Gigabit Ethernet Card

What I did:
I already downloaded and installed the bcm5700 driver, which I've heard works with the BCM5789.
I then did '/sbin/modprobe bcm5700' and rebooted.
Still no luck, so I rebooted and typed "pci=noacpi noapic acpi=off" at the end of the boot script in grub with no observable changes (should noapic be noacpi? I got that boot option off another thread).

Output:
[root]# /sbin/lspci
...snip...
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 7145
03:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation: Unknown device 4222 (rev 02)
04:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetLink BCM5789 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 21)
0a:09.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments: Unknown device 8039
...snip...

[root]# /sbin/lsmod | grep bcm
bcm5700 156524 0

[root]# /sbin/ifconfig 192.168.2.5 netmask 255.255.255.0 eth0
SIOSIFNETMASK: No such device
SIOCGIFADDR: No such device
eth0: Host name lookup failure


Getting connected to the net is my number one priority right now, and I'm stuck! Later I'll figure out the Graphics Card, Wireless, and touchy touch-pad. Thanks a lot for all the help; LinuxQuestions rocks!

what does 'kudzu start' says?

does your NIC works when you do 'modprobe bcm5700'?

what does 'mii-tool' show?

depending upon your configuration, you may need to alias your eth0 with the bcm5700 in /etc/modules.conf.

Try the netconfig command , c if it detects ur network card

just check /sbin/ifconfig -a, whether it shows or not.

Also your command:
/sbin/ifconfig 192.168.2.5 netmask 255.255.255.0 eth0

gives an error in my FC4 !

Thanks for the advice. I tried:

'ifconfig -a'
'mii-tool'
'netconfig' (not installed, I don't think)
'kudzu start'
'kudzu -p'

The output for the above commands is below (MAN it takes a long time to manually type all that info into my desktop computer! I've got to get that laptop connected!)

I also tried Gnome's 'Internet Configuration Wizard' under the 'System Tools' menu, which found my Broadcom card as /dev/eth0, even though /dev/eth0 does not exist. Then I used the 'Network Device Control' under 'System Tools' adn tried to activate it using the 'Activate' button. An error window popped up saying, "tg3 device eth0 does not seem to be present, delaying initialization." I find it funny that it's a tg3 device and not a bcm5700 device.


RESULTS:

[root]# ifconfig -a
lo Link encap: Local Loopback
...snip...
sit0 Link encap:IPv6-in-IPv4
NOARP MTU:1480 Metric:1
RX packets: 0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX ...same...
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)

What is sit0??? Never heard of it.

[root]# mii-tool
no MII interfaces found
[root]# whereis netconfig
netconfig: <-- I don't have netconfig. ('locate' returns ethernetconfig.py)
[root]# kudzu start
Error sending status request (Operation not permitted)
[root]# kudzu stop
[root]# kudzu start
[root]# kudzu -p
...snip...
class: NETWORK
bus: PCI
detached: 0
device: eth0
driver: bcm5700
desc: "Broadcom Corporation NetLink BCM5789 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express"
vendorId: 14e4
deviceId: 0094
subVendorId: 1025
subDeviceId: 0094
pciType: 1
pcidom: 0
pcibus: 4
pcidev: 0
pcifn: 0
-
class: NETWORK <-- must be my wireless card
bus: PCI
detached: 0
device: eth1
driver: unknown
desc: "Intel Corporation: Unknown device 4222"
vendorId: 8086
deviceId: 4222
subVendorId: 8086
subDeviceId: 1000
pciType: 1
pcidom: 0
pcibus: 3
pcidev: 0
pcifn: 0
...snip...
[root]#

your network card was not properly installed. now here's what you got to do. when kudzu detect your nic, it will autoconfigure it and make it working and you don't have to do anything. incase there is still some problem try looking for the modulue the kernel loads for your nic using the command 'lsmod' , write it down and add something like this in your /etc/modules.conf--> alias eth0 module_name

i think this should get your nic working.

I don't think kudzu detects my nic. /etc/modules.conf didn't exist, so I created one with a single line 'alias eth0 bcm5700' where bcm5700 was the driver I installed using 'modprobe' and does in fact appear using 'lsmod'. After rebooting, still no change. I checked dmesg which has a few interesting lines, especially this one:

bcm5700: probe of 0000:04:00.0 failed with error -16

Others:
...snip...
PCI: failed to allocate mem resource #0:1000@40000000 for 0000:03:00.0
PCI: failed to allocate mem resource #0:10000@40000000 for 0000:04:00.0
...snip...
Number of CPUs sharing cache didn't match any known set of CPUs <--- (dual Pentium M Processors)
Number of CPUs sharing cache didn't match any known set of CPUs
apm: BIOS not found.
...snip...
ide0: I/O resource 0x1F0-0x1F7 not free
ide0: ports already in use, skipping probe
...snip...
PCI: Unable to reserve mem region #1:c0100000@40000000 for device 0000:04:00.0
bcm5700: probe of 0000:04:00.0 failed with error -16
...snip

BREAK!
does your nic works after this and before reboot?

<quote>BREAK!
does your nic works after this and before reboot?</quote>

Does my nic work after what? After adding the line to /etc/modules.conf? Nope. And what's a good way to test that it IS working? I've been using
'ifconfig eth0 up'

Aha! What's this all about?? Early in the boot sequence, I get a memory allocation error for the location of my nic. Is that the problem? Also, both drivers (tg3 and bcm5700) fail with error -16.

[root]# cat /var/log/dmesg | grep 04:00 <---- PCI slot where my card is installed
PCI: Failed to allocate mem resource #0:10000@40000000 for 0000:04:00.0
PCI: Enabling device 0000:04:00.0 (0000 -> 0002)
ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:04:00.0[A] -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 217
PCI: Failed to allocate mem resource #1:c0100000@40000000 for device 0000:04:00.0
tg3: probe of 0000:04:00.0 filed with error -16
ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:04:00.0[A] -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 217
PCI: Unable to reserve mem region #1:c0100000@40000000 for device 0000:04:00.0
bcm5700: probe of 0000:04:00.0 failed with error -16

[root]# lspci | grep BCM
04:00.0 Ethernet contoller: Broadcom Corporation NetLink BCM5789 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 21)


Am I on the wrong track here? Is there anyone in this world who has successfully got linux to work with the Broadcom BCM5789 Ethernet Card?

Still no luck, but digging a little deeper, this may be the problem. Looking at dmesg, these lines may mean the ethernet driver can't allocate the i/o resources, preventing it from probing for the ethernet card:

tg3: Cannot obtain PCI resources, aborting.
tg3: probe of 0000:04:00.0 failed with error -16 (tg3 is redhat's ethernet driver)
bcm5700: probe of 0000:04:00.0 failed with error -16 (bcm5700 is broadcom's ethernet driver)
ide0: ports already in use, skipping probe (04:00.0 means PCI Bus 4, where my card is plugged in)
ide0: I/O resource 0x1F0-0x1F7 not free.

Then looking at 'cat /proc/ioports' I see this line:

01f0-01f7 : libata (Could it be that libata is stealing the nic's resources?)



So, does anybody know anything about allocation of mem resources? Can I reserve the 0x1F0-0x1F7 memory for my ethernet card on boot? Also, what does ide0 mean and how does it relate to PCI resources? Could my ethernet card be plugged into the ide0 slot on the motherboard!?! I seriously need to take a class on computer hardware!

ide0 is your primary hard disk interface.

Looks like there could be a resource conflict. Is your ide interface in a PCI card slot, surely not ??! In my experience, the ide0 and ide1 is normally built in to the motherboard and connected to the VIA. The last machine I had with an 'IO Card' was a 486DX66 with VL-Bus i/O card - very old ! I shouldn't have thought that there could be a conflict between your ide and a PCI card, but it's worth a poke around.


Your BIOS (normally hit DEL or F1 depending on BIOS at the power on test stage), should allow you to reserve certain memory ranges , IRQ and IO addresses - have you tried any of that ?

Have you considered if Plug and Play is causing any of this - in the past I've had to turn P&P off to get Linux detecting interfaces on a box and conversely enable it on other boxes to make the SAME card work ! (I don't know if this is applicable to PCI cards, though as the things I'm talking about are ISA.)

Do you have a setup disk for the card and is there a config utility on it ? If so, have you tried using that under windows or dos or whatever to check the card's own settings ?

Sorry they're all questions, but since I don't know your machine...

Have a look at what I've suggested anyways.

This issue got me this morning too. What finally worked for me was not to use insmod, which I know is legacy.

So:
find / -name tg3.ko -print
insmod /blah/path/to/tg3.ko (for 2.6+)

After this, all worked fine again.