Setting up an old Network Card (Problem with modprobe)
 

Hi there!

I've trouble setting up my old network card ... probably I should have posted in the newbie forum but I hope you will help me anyway.

I want to install gentoo on my old computer and I've got the problem that I dont know what network it is.
Windows shows it as "NE2000 compatible" with IRQ 3 and E/A 0300-031F.
The gentoo install manual says that I have to use "modprobe pcnet32" to load the module.
But this results in:
/lib/modules/2.4.21-gss/kernel/drivers/net/pcnet32.o: init_module: No such device
Hint: insmod errors can be caused by incorrect module parameters, including invalid IO or IRQ parameters.
You may find more information in syslog or the output from dmesg
/lib/modules/2.4.21-gss/kernel/drivers/net/pcnet32.o: insmod /lib/modules/2.4.21-gss/kernel/drivers/net/pcnet32.o failed
/lib/modules/2.4.21-gss/kernel/drivers/net/pcnet32.o: insmod pcnet32 failed

I hope that there is somebody who can help me with this problem!


One last question:
Is there any hardware detection tool like "Knoppix" does to search for hardware / the correct configuration?

Do:

/sbin/lspci

as root and it should tell you what is plugged into your PCI bus. This is the easiest way to find out what the card is, and from there where can load the right module.

slight

I think it would be no problem to configure a PCI card but it's an old ISA card and because of that PCI hutplugging does not work.

I hope it will be enough to set the IRQ and E/A settings correctly but I dont know how to tell modprobe ...

Do you have ISAPNP (ISA plug and play) installed? Most distro's come with it configured (it's a kernel option too, I believe) and if that is on than it should be able to set itself and all you have to worry about is inserting the correct module. If you don't have ISAPNP, then this might be the cause of yoiur troubles.

slight

I dont really know, I'm booting from an install-CD and there is no boot option which enables ISAPNP.

Booting without options results in "command not found" when trying isapnp on the console ...

What version of Gentoo are you using?

slight

the latest that is availible for download at our university.
I think that should also be the lastest version at all.

My guess would be that you're attempting to load the wrong module. I'm pretty sure I got one of those things working once, but I can't recall which module I had to load and how, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't "pcnet32".

Try "ne2000" or something like that instead.

If no such module exists try looking in /lib/modules and find the subdirectory which holds the network card drivers, look if anything in there has a name with "ne2000" in it.

OK, thanx ... you got it ;)

Using the module "ne.o" works fine after figuring out that you need the option "io=0xABC" for ISA cards.

Thanx for all your help!