Right now my brand-new Mandrake system has no internet, even though it's hard-wired. At boot, eth0 fails to start after 60 seconds. KDE says my network card is an nForce2 MCP Networking Adapter and Linux is using the "forcedeth" module. For this card and for my video card, I booted to Windows and got the universal driver from NVIDIA. The compile for the driver failed. I wanted to play with the kernel (2.4.something) configuration hoping there was an NVIDIA module in there that I could add, but /usr/src does not have any kernel sources in it. I guess it's because I haven't updated my kernel yet on the system. So now I'm stuck. With no way of compiling the driver or adding kernel modules, how can I get my internet working?

TIA,
astro

I have the ASUS A7N8X-X mobo with the NForce2 chipset, and it works fine with kernel 2.6.7. I don't use NVIDIA's drivers for the ethernet, I use the reverse-engineered one that you referred to called "forcedeth". However, the version in the 2.4.somthing kernel is probably not working as well as the one in 2.6.7 is for me.

Try booting to windows and downloading the sources for 2.6.7, it is a great kernel, as it contains drivers for almost all aspects of the NForce2 chipset.