Cant find drivers for NIC (Catch 22?)
 

I finally got my old box up and running again. Decided to have another whirl at linux since I have some free time to burn. Last time i attempted this RH 7.6 was the latest distro out. Im planning on trying 9.

I used the CDs last time but decided this time I was going to be different and do the FTP install. I created a RH boot disk went through all the menus and picked FTP from the "What type of media contains the packages to be installed"

This yeilds the friendly "Unable to find any deives of the type neeed for this installation type. Would you like to manually select your driver or use a disk"

I then picked manually select a driver and was greeted with a "No drivers were found to manually insert. Would you like to use a driver disk"

So I picked the disk option. Prior to this I went to Linksys' site and grabbed the latest version of driver for my card (NC100), unpacked them to a directory, and copied the entire disk to the floppy.

Insert the floppy and hit load driver disk. Picked fd0 from the next list and hit ok. "Insert your driver disk into /dev/fd0 and press ok to continue" So i did and the screen flashes and nothing happens.

Figuring maybe the program was havign a hard time navigating to the linux folder within I decided I was going to get the stuff out of the folder using my Windoze machine. I was greeted by a txt file telling me to download of all things a .C file (tulip.c) and compile it using gcc to get a tulip.o.

It would seem that linux hasnt quite become as user friendly as I thought it would have in the time Ive been gone lol.

Is it a fair to assume that im going to be pretty much forced into downloading GCC for windows and doing the whole compile deal. Furthermore, what if I am unable to download GCC, will this option of install be eliminated from my use? Thanks in advanced.

edit* its also worth mentioning that I actually did try searching this specific forum as well as Red Hats site for the solution. Suffice it to say thier recommendation was the following sole sentence in reference to the FTP alternate installation:

"You will need to download your network driver"

........*sigh*

Nope. Just means you're going to go here http://www.lintegrate.nl/download/mo...es/2.2.21/net/ and download the prebuilt and retry it. :D

oh dear god you just made my night =P


Funnier still is the link provided to me by linksys in thier helpfile is broken so no go on that route lol. thanks again.

glad I could help...good luck

tried some other stuff
 

I went ahead and threw that file on another floppy and tried to use it when asked for the drivers disk. It just keeps asking me to install the disk as if it doesnt see the driver.

Thinking that maybe it was some kind of issue with the installer program I tried save the tulip.o file to the RH boot disk in the hopes that it would either load the driver off the disk on start up or see the driver. Unfortunately the RH boot disk is quite full to begin with and the tulip.o file wont fit onto the same disk forcing me to use 2 seperate diskettes.

(RH disk only has 17.5kb open and the tulip.o file is 38kb)

Im sure theres something else Im not seeing or trying. Gonna try googling some more while I wait on a reply.

are you sure /dev/fd0 is getting seen? (i know you're booting from it, but does the created ramdisk actually 'see' the floppy device?)
do you need to load anything else to use the nic? (hotplug, isa/pnp etc.)
possibly you could build a new kernel for the RH boot disk with the nic support compiled in.

Thanks for the quick reply. As for the first question im not really sure. On boot from the floppy but before the menu Im presented with a hail of text messages. Reminds me of the hardware detects when I had RH7.6 on the box. Then the menu comes up asking me what I want to do. I would assume it can see it since every time I hit ok at the insert drivers disk the light for the floppy comes up....then again who knows.

As for the network question I actually have 2 NIC cards in there right now. One ISA one set to PnP mode with a jumper. The other is your run of the mill PnP Linksys PCI NIC. I figured the compiled tulip.o was all I was going to need.

I attempted to cut the glut on the boot disk by deleteing alot of the .msg files but even deleting those didnt release enough space to drop the compiled file onto it.

I have rawwrite and 2 image files my friend grabbed for me earlier from the RH ftp site. I havent the slighest clue how to go about including my drivers into the image itself.

The RH help file im reading is still being less than forthcomming about the information to get this sucker working :confused:

ahh does this help?
 

During that hail of text I caught a number of lines about FDC. none of them looked bad but unfortunately the screen flys past to quick. I tried hitting the pause/break key to see if it would halt the process so I could read over it but no go =/

Sorry about the long wait. They do cable maintainence here at this time of the morning so click..no internet.

Not being all that familiar with Red Hat I'm going to ASSUME it would output an error if it saw the tulip driver, tried it, and didn't like it. This points me to thinking it either isn't reading the floppy, or the contents of the floppy are confusing it. after you boot your kernel, can you access the floppy and copy the driver to the hard disk? Or heck if you can even see the contents of the floppy that means its mounted correctly. I'm wondering if maybe you have to include the source tree as well as the binary on your floppy disk. Try copying a floppy disk with the uncompressed source, and dropping the binary into a couple of likely spots on it.

I did some searching on RH's ftp site and came across the directory where my friend had downloaded the floppy boot image and noticed there was other images in there as well.

I downloaded them and just for $hits I went ahead and used rawwrite to move them onto floppies thinking they were a different version of the boot floppy with potentially different drivers. I realized I was wrong because these floppies wouldnt boot like the original one does.

On another angry/frustrated whim I decided to insert these new imaged floppies when the original boot floppy asked for a driver disk. And then I saw what ive been seeking for the last 3 hours:

"Loading Drivers Disk"

Only then the somewhat vague name of the image file clicked in my head (drvnet.img). *Smacks forhead and yells some profanities*

After finally finding a driver that would work with my card and getting DHCP to work Im trying to find a place to get the distro. For whatever reason its not letting me pull from redhats site (more than likely becuase im putting in the wrong address or folder location).

Ill let you know if I have any progress aiming this program to the correct spot.


*edit Oh by the way, In case you cant tell im a little thick in the head and had I read the text file in the folder with the images I would have known from the start of this fiasco what those other images were for...

hah! don't feel too bad tho....we all have done things like this ...or worse
hope the rest goes well

hurray!
 

all is well now. Finally got it to pull the image. Doing the reformatting and what not now. I know that I want to use a journal file system (ext3) but as far as the mount points I havent a good idea how to slice up the avilable hard drive space.

Hard Drive 1:
7mb /boot (RH help file said I couldnt break 16mb)
Root directory is ext3 2.4gb. (The more the merrier =) ?).

Hard Drive 2:
64mb system ram and I have a 314mb swap defined (RH help recommended 2x system ram at least).
Leaving me with 2gb open.

I realize these numbers may seem small but Im working with 2 tiny hard drives (2.4 and 2.3gb)

This is the aspect of linux I never really understood to well so any insight or links you can think of offhand would be great. I read over this guide
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=6161 and this one RedHat using Disk Druid to get a better idea about how the slicing works but Im still unsure.

I know for sure I want to be doing Coldfusion and have a SSH/FTP (internal network only) server. Perhaps a /usr or /home mount point would be good?

bump =P