Kernal Upgrade Help - NIC
 

Hello from Noob-town,

I recently loaded a new Debian-Kernal in the hopes of making my wireless network card work (Linksys WMP54G). Under LinuxAnswers I found the “ndiswrapper on Debian Sarge without having to compile anything” instructions by Mike Zila that walked me through the process. Accordingly, I upgraded my kernel from 2.4.27-2-386 to 2.6.8-2-386. Now, upon boot up I can select either version. However, I can’t use my existing wired NIC card with the new kernel. It works with version 2.4.27-2-386 but not 2.6.8-2-386. Are there settings within the new kernel that I adjust to make the wired NIC card work? I need the wired NIC to download ndiswrapper so that I can attempt to get the wirless card working.

Thank you in advance,

Greg

The first question would be ... do you see any evidence of the NIC? In the /dev directory perhaps, or maybe lspci? If you browse through the boot-log or dmesg output, do you see evidence of the card being recognized and initialized?

How did you prepare your Linux build to "you-think, include" support for this device? More details are needed.

(Incidentally, most of the cards I have seen use the driver tulip. You can probably use lsmod in the old kernel to see what device-driver is actually running that card.)

I looked at the boot record for both versions. This is a portion from 2.6.

Linux Tulip driver version 1.1.13 (May 11, 2002)
PCI: Found IRQ 11 for device 0000:02:0b.0
tulip0: EEPROM default media type Autosense.
tulip0: Index #0 - Media 10baseT (#0) described by a 21142 Serial PHY (2) block.
tulip0: Index #1 - Media 10baseT-FDX (#4) described by a 21142 Serial PHY (2) block.
tulip0: Index #2 - Media 100baseTx (#3) described by a 21143 SYM PHY (4) block.tulip0: Index #3 - Media 100baseTx-FDX (#5) described by a 21143 SYM PHY (4) block.
eth1: Digital DS21143 Tulip rev 48 at 0xd880, 00:00:F8:04:F3:1D, IRQ 11.
gameport: pci0000:02:0c.1 speed 1125 kHz
Real Time Clock Driver v1.12
input: PC Speaker
parport: PnPBIOS parport detected.
parport0: PC-style at 0x378 (0x778), irq 7, dma 3 [PCSPP,TRISTATE,COMPAT,ECP,DMA]
inserting floppy driver for 2.6.8-2-386
Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M
FDC 0 is a post-1991 82077
NET: Registered protocol family 10
Disabled Privacy Extensions on device c02cc960(lo)
IPv6 over IPv4 tunneling driver

This is from 2.4

Linux Tulip driver version 0.9.15-pre12 (Aug 9, 2002)
PCI: Found IRQ 11 for device 02:0b.0
tulip0: EEPROM default media type Autosense.
tulip0: Index #0 - Media 10baseT (#0) described by a 21142 Serial PHY (2) block .
tulip0: Index #1 - Media 10baseT-FDX (#4) described by a 21142 Serial PHY (2) b lock.
tulip0: Index #2 - Media 100baseTx (#3) described by a 21143 SYM PHY (4) block.
tulip0: Index #3 - Media 100baseTx-FDX (#5) described by a 21143 SYM PHY (4) bl ock.
eth0: Digital DS21143 Tulip rev 48 at 0xd880, 00:00:F8:04:F3:1D, IRQ 11.
uhci.c: USB Universal Host Controller Interface driver v1.1
ich2rom: firmware access control, I can't enable writes
pci_hotplug: PCI Hot Plug PCI Core version: 0.5
shpchp: acpi_shpchprm:get_device PCI ROOT HID fail=0x1001
pci_hotplug: PCI Hot Plug PCI Core version: 0.5
pciehp: acpi_pciehprm:get_device PCI ROOT HID fail=0x1001
i810_rng hardware driver 0.9.8 loaded
hw_random: misc device register failed
usb.c: registered new driver usblp
printer.c: usblp0: USB Bidirectional printer dev 2 if 0 alt 0 proto 2 vid 0x04A9 pid 0x107F
printer.c: v0.13: USB Printer Device Class driver
apm: BIOS version 1.2 Flags 0x03 (Driver version 1.16)

I notice from the 2.6 version that the Tulip driver is differnet. Is there a way I can force 2.6 to use the Tulip driver version 0.9.15-pre12?

Greg

The most obvious change is that the NIC is now at eth1 instead of eth0. Debian uses a config file at /etc/network/interfaces. Mine contains lines

iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.1.2
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.1.254

so yours would need to be setting eth1 instead for the 2.6 kernel.

That did it. Thanks.

Greg