How do i install a driver?
 

Hi,

Just installed Suse as a Dual boot. Internet is not working and i think its because the ethernet port is not working.

I got a driver from the marvell website. Filename install-8_28.tar.bz2.

How do i install it? i'm using KDE. I know nothing.

Thank.

Can we have some specs on your hardware? What model of eth card are we talking about? What mobo?

Mother Board: A8N SLI Deluxe
Graphics: x600xt Sapphire Radeon 256mb PCIe
Memory: 1024mb
Hard Disk: 2 X 80GB Sata Hard Drives
Ethernet: On board the motherboard. It is a Yukon 88E8001 32-bit Gigabit Ethernet Controller i think.

Details on http://www.marvell.com/products/pcconn/yukon/index.jsp

Have down loaded the file. Can't i just click on it and it will do it all for me?

HI,

U can view a textfile in the "driver file".
Inside it will list & instruct u how to untar & install.....

As diff files proceed in diff ways.
According to what i know.....

Working on the assumption that you have no clue on what to do, I've downloaded the readme file from their webpage. The first thing that you need to do as per the prerequisites is download kernel sources for you currently running kernel. In SUSE you can probably do this in YaST by doing a search for some variety of kernel, sources, or both. This will install an rpm containing you kernel sources should be installed into /usr/src/linux.

While we are on the topic of YaST, you probably also want to install the program make through YaST, since as I remember correctly, it doesn't come default installed in SUSE.

At this point you want to login as root in a console, and then use the cd command to change to user source linux.
Therein you should find several things. This is an example of my /usr/src/ directory.

In this example,, my kernel sources are at linux-source-2.6.12, and there is a symbolic link linux that points to them. You may have to create this link manually. You would do this by executing a command as root (permissions),

At this point you should simply be ready to install. Unpack your driver, you can probably do this with Ark, or if you have to tar -xjvf <driver bundle>. Then, use the cd command to change your terminal into the unpacked driver bundle, and, still as root, execute their install script. It should be something like install or install_sh.
First make sure the script is executable, by doing
and then execute it

Hopefully, this helps, or if I went into to much depth, I apologize if I condescended you.

Valhalla,

THanks for that. You didn't go into too much detail. I am still struggling to understand what you have said.

I don't have ethernet on Suse (why i'm trying to install the driver for the ethernet) so i have to use winXP to download the software and then try and get it from cd or something into Suse.

I took a look at the website (http://www.novell.com/products/suselinux/whatsnew.html) and it says that the linux kernel is 2.6.13. Can i download that? where do i get it from?

Thanks for your help.

generally speaking, there is package that you can install from SuSE using YaST, their system package manager. Basically, try and use the software installer in SUSE. You might be able to use a 2.6.13 kernel from kernel.org, but some of the commercial distibutions patch their kernels, so there might be some binary incompatibilities between the source and the running kernel that could cause a module (driver) built in this way to be unloadable. Its been to long since the last time I used SuSE so I can't give you exact instructions on installing the kernel sources, but there should be a package you can install named something like kernel-sources-2.6.13 that will appear when you do a search in YaST's rpm installer

It is not necessary you install the driver, you already have it.
The driver is called "sk98lin", if you look at your /lib/modules/2.6.11.4-21.7-default/kernel/drivers/net/sk98lin (the path could differ in the "2.6.11.4-21.7-default" section since you're probably using a different kernel)
you can find it.
You can check if it is loaded automatically at boot by
dmesg | grep -i sk98lin
or by
lsmod
I guess good chances are it is automatically loaded
In order you configure your network card you must go to YAST and pick up "network card" or something similar
(my box is set up in Italian).
The problems come if the driver isn't loaded automatically, as I'm using Suse for fun and I cannot tell you how to load the module at boot.
Good chance is you add a line like
alias sk98lin eth0
in your /etc/modprobe.conf
but it may be possible Suse resets come config files at shutdown.
Of course you can load the module manually by (as root)
/sbin/modprobe sk98lin
I'd suggest you post this question to Suse LQ Forum section
Hope this helps
Ciao