I'm trying to put Slackware 9.0 on a Dell Dimension 2400. The installation goes smoothly except for two things, the video (I'll save that for another thread) and the ethernet connection.

I've read the many posts on LQO about this ethernet "card" (its built into the motherboard) and they have been helpful, but I've run into a problem I simply can't figure out.

I've got the Broadcom linux driver and if I compile it under the installed 2.4.20,(using the bare.i kernel) I've got no problems. However, I want to make a custom kernel, so I got 2.4.22 from kernel.org,and compiled a new kernel and installed it. After I reboot to use the new kernel, I recompiled the Broadcom drivers (make, make install, depmod -a, modprobe BCM4400) with no errors. If I run ifconfig eth0 up, the card is recognized and I can see it with a plain ifconfig. However, if I run dhcpcd -d eth0, the mac address of the card is displayed, but it never gets an ip address from my router. According to the logs, it timed out waiting for a DHCP response. If I run ifconfig immediately after the timeout, eth0 is now gone. lsmod shows the driver is still loaded, but it isn't being used by anything. However, if I go back to bare.i and recompile and re-install the Broadcom driver, it works again. So I'm assuming two things:

1) The router is responding to DHCP requests just fine
2) I'm missing something in the 2.4.22 compile that is critical, however, I have no idea what that might be. I've got TCP/IP selected for networking, but I don't have any ethernet cards selected in the Networking Devices section.

Anybody got any ideas?

OK, sign me up for the next dope slap. When I was setting up the configuration for the kernel compile, I turned off the development-level stuff (that first menu in make menuconfig). Since the Broadcom support is still considered "experimental", that meant I never saw it. Once I woke up and turned that on, the Broadcom 4400 support was there and compiled like a charm. Now it gets an IP and I can surf away! Of course I'm surfing with Lynx until I get the graphic problem sorted out .