Mdk 10.1 network card installation problem
 

Hello,

I installed Mandrake 10.1 Community. Everything went fine and it is working.

I then tried to configure network using DrakConf. When trying to add a new network interface, it suggests me only 2 options:

- usb device
- manual selection of a driver

First one is a little weird. It seems to be for a point-to-point connection.

So I choosed second option. I know that this card needs 8139too driver (this card was on another box with Fedora Core 2 before and worked fine). I select this one.

Next screen is to select automatic or manual configuration or driver options. Whatever I choose, I have a small dialog box (it closes immediately, so I can't read it) and I am back to first screen (the one with USB option)!

I tried some manual configuration. I added this line to /etc/modprobe.conf


Then I loaded the driver:

modprobe 8139too

I created ifcfg-eth0 in network-scripts (with same options as on FC2 box).
And then I tried to bring interface up with:

ifup eth0

I got an error message:

interface eth0 not found

Does anybody have an idea of what I can do for this? Is there any bug with drakconnect? And did I miss something for manual configuration?

Thanks a lot for any help.

PS: I do not have Internet access on the Mandrake box.

Check the output of lsmod, dmesg and lsdev

You may have loaded the module but it may not be recognizing the card.

After you load the module you should get a message (visible via dmesg) indicating that the driver discovered the card.

If it doesn't drakconf will not show the new interface, no matter what you do.

Thanks opjose for these ideas :) I will do this test (check dmesg just after the load of the driver). But for the moment, I have no access to this box ;)

There is something strange I noticed. If I do an lspci, the card returned an 8119 id instead of 8139. Maybe there is a hardware problem preventing driver to recognize the card. Is there any way to force him to handle this card?

A-hah!

You have a card with a different rev.

In this situation what I normally do is download the kernel, kernel.src and kernel-source rpm's for a newer non-developement kernel (if possible).

I unpack the .src rpm so I can see the kernel source and pour thru the respective driver files to see if the new ID's (and often code) have been added to the kernel to support the new card revision.

If so I'll first try installing the kernel and kernel-source rpm's to see if this fixes the problem.

If not the next thing to do is to view the driver's homepage (if available) and see if the author/maintainer has done any updates to the driver to include my card.

Often all that needs to be done is either a line or two change, or single file replacement and a recompile of just the one driver.

It gets copied to /lib/modules/xxx replacing the old one, and you're done after a new modprobe.

I swapped this card with the one in my FC2 box. And everything works perfect now :)

The card with the special ID is correclty detected by Fedora (I have a recent kernel version on it, that could be the reason). And the one that Mandrake is using, returns the correct identifier.

Maybe I will do more investigations when I will have Internet acces at home.

Thanks a lot opjose for your help

Great!

Yeah, you could probably find a similiar or newer rev kernel for MDK which would have also solved this problem for you.