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I am very new to Linux. I know a few commands (ls, cd, ifconfig), but I don't have very much knowledge of their options or any other commands. I have an old lap top that was given to me. I decided to put a distro of Linux called DeLi 0.7 on it. All seems well except for networking.
I have an old 3com 3C3FEM556C card. To be honest, I don't have any clue whether it is installed properly or not. I have the feeling that it is not. When I do an ifconfig nothing shows up.
How do I tell whether it is installed, and how can I get it installed if it is not?
if the system can see the card (it was listed using one of hte ls commands..) try loading the driver module
modprobe 3c574_cs
If there is no error then the driver should have loaded successfully.
lsmod will list the loaded modules so you can verify it is indeed running.
tail /var/log/messages should show you the card being loaded and what eth(X) designation it was given... Most likely eth0
you can try at this point to bring the interface up (the Interface MUST be plugged into a hub or switch in order to come up)
ifup eth0
if it comes up successfully you are golden.. if not then you may need to edit the configuration for the network interface.. and I have no clue where it would be in that distro..
when i run lspcmcia i get:
ksh: lspcmcia: not found
lsmod shows:
rtc
com20020
arcnet
*the com20020 thing looks familier. when i was installing DeLi Linux during the network setup portion, it did this probe thing and eventually came back and said "A networking card using the com20020.0 module has been detected."
what should i do now? is my nic not being recognized at all? also, should i consider a more popular distrobution, and if so what would another good one for an OOOLD laptop be?
Last edited by ronnieoverby; 10-10-2006 at 09:46 AM.
It doesn't look like the PCMCIA modules are loaded..
check for a pcmcia startup script in /etc/init.d
getting pcmcia support started might be as easy as running /etc/init.d/pcmcia start
If there is no startup script there, you will either need to install the pcmcia packages from your distribution, or compile pcmcia support from source code..
Once pcmcia is working, lspcmcia should list the card, and then the module should load properly and you can move forward..
DSL would be a more supported distro for a underpowered machine.. it's debian based and has a large community around it. http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
This is a live distro that can be installed to the Hard drive.. The documentation on their web site is fairly good.
You could try slackware with fluxbox window manager instead of kde. You should only need the first disk.
Slackware's system reqs are
# 486 processor
# 16MB RAM (32MB suggested)
# 100-500 megabytes of hard disk space for a minimal and around 3.5GB for full install
I'd try it, Slackware is a great OS
I'm pretty sure fluxbox and also xfce will be installed. You can just leave kde checked, when the first disk is finished installing and it asks for disk two, there is an option to stop there and finish up. Or you can install the kde packages and just not use the window manager, but it will eat up a bit of that 10GB hd. A full Slack install will use up just under half of that hd.
I'll be trying xubuntu out on the 233 mmx machines I have in my office.. should be interesting. I think they currently have RH 7.3 on them, might even be RH 6....
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