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Hardware Installation - Frustration

Hallo,
I've installed Suse 7.1 om my System two days ago. From Installation point of view every thing went right. From my point of view nothing is working. I've a lot of components in my PC which are not supported. Sound, TCP/IP Card, Scanner, SCSI- adapter. For all components I've the drivers on floppy. Installation tool told me that everything could be maintained later. Now it is later but I didn't get any info how to say to the system : "Take the driver from floppy" as I do it in Windows.
Is anybody available to help ?

best regards

What are the components exactly... they're probably supported in the stock kernel, so you'll need load the modules, or at worst recompile the kernel, which isn't too bad either.

Post some makes and model numbers.

Jamie...

Hi Jamie,

the biggest issue is the SCSI host adapter
PCI NCR C810 SCSI
the 2nd is
FA311 Fast Ethernet PCI Card
I've two Computers on a Windows net one is not installing, because harddisc is not found (not supported Host adapter) :-)
One don't support net work.
I've got both drivers : the ethernet card one is provided together with Windows drivers. The SCSI adapter is special, because I downloaded 3 possible.
The main point is how to tell the system to use them. At the moment I have only the choise between implemented devices.
As I understand you right, I have to compile the kernel ?

Many thanks for your help

The code you want for the SCSI card is available in the kernel already, so you won't need the external driver, the same is probably true with the network card, but I havn't looked...

To enable the SCSI card support you want to follow the kernel HOWTO, you can find it at http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Kernel-HOWTO.html

Once support for the SCSI controller is in the kernel you should be able to access the devices hanging off it (assuming you've built support for them in the kernel too). It looks a little scary at first but isn't really that bad! It boils down to choosing the things you want, and then running

Code:

make dep

make bzlilo

make modules

rm -rf /lib/modules/2.x.x/

make modules_install

Then you reboot... You might want to use make bzImage if your distribution puts its kernel somewhere other than / (like /boot), if you do this you'll need to copy the new kernel accross yourself, you'll find it in /usr/src/linux/arch/i386/ once the compile is done. Note that the above doesn't make your old kernel available as a fall back, this is a good idea unless you're pretty confident that you've chosen the right bits in your config.

Have a read and post the specifics back, have a look in your kernel for mention of your network card too, it should be there somewhere.

HTH

Jamie...

Hi Jamie,

thanks, thanks, thanks,
I don't know what I've done but for the SCSI-Controler it went !

HTH
Ramon

Ramon,

The FA-311 may be a little bit more of a pain in the butt; it can be kind of stubborn in Linux. If your kernel doesn't have built-in support for it, you'll have to compile a module from source. The card uses the natsemi driver, which is available here. Installation instructions can be found here.