Hi,
I am new to Linux. Recently installed CentOS 5.1.It is a dual boot desktop machine with windows xp. CentOS is not able to find the network card. Tried all the drivers.

Earlier my machine used to be dual boot with xp and ubuntu, and wired network was working fine in Ubuntu. But now I installed CentOS in place of Ubuntu and it is not able to detect network card.

I tried all the drivers which are there in Network option but nothing helps to detect network card.

Its Acer Desktop with AMD Processor, 1gb ram, 160gb hdd, nvidia chipset.

Reinstalled again in text mode, still same. Doesn't help.

I definately need some Technical help here.

Thanks in Advance.

Dweller-in-Peace

Hello and welcome to LQ.

That's a reflex from a bygone era. With GNU/Linux a lot of problems can be dealt with w/o reinstalling the OS or packages. That is necessary only in a very few distinct situations.


Unless anyone here has a similar laptop we need to see chipset details of the (PCMCIA/USB/builtin?) ethernet device. Different ways to go about it: load some distro you know works in Live CD mode and see what it says about the device or in CentOS run (whichever is available) 'lspci', 'lshw' or if nothing works 'dmesg|grep -i chip' after bootup.

Hi, chip is NForce-MCP61:chipset revision 162. And Ethernet controller is Marvell Technology Group Ltd, 88E8056 PCI-e Gigabit ethernet Controller.

Thank you.

Marvell (Yukon)? 88E8056 seems to be (somewhat) covered by one of the SKGE (SysKonnect GigaEthernet) Yukon (sk98lin) or Yukon2 (sky2) drivers. "Somewhat" since there seems to be a lot of issues with these drivers and I don't know if Sky2 has stabilised by now. Alternatively see the Marvell site for their drivers if you experience problems with the other drivers. Whether due to (combinations of) chipsets or blood sacrifices to the wrong bus the chance of you winning the lottery is infinitesimal, the chance of you encountering stability issues with the 88E8056 is not.