Hey guys -

I'm working on getting Slack X up and running on a Sony Vaio PCG-FXA49. I had it installed a few months ago, but needed to wipe it for a business trip. I'm getting it restored now, but it's not going as easy as it did last time...

I haven't rebuilt the kernel yet, you should know that straight off.

The two problems I'm working on right now are network connectivity, and hotplug.

Hotplug, whenever it's loaded, freezes the machine in startup. Only way I can get it to boot is passing -nohotplug thru Lilo (i have a kernel entry with this option added in the boot menu). System works fine (aside from my other issues i'm sorting out).

My second problem might be tied to the first...

Eth0 doesn't show up. Period. ifconfig returns the loopback info, and "ifconfig eth0 up" returns "no such device". I've run the netconfig util thru pkgtool (as per http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?s=&threadid=270023&perpage=15&highlight=interface%20not%20found&pagenumber=2 which I found), but it only reset it for DHCP, and aside from adding the hostname and domain (all three of which saw no change to the info), i don't think that did anything to redetect the hardware.

What i'm wondering is if because hotplug's not loading, is it not finding the network card? What'm I missing here?

Any thoughts anyone can throw out would be *greatly* appreciated.

Cheers,

-- NM

have you tried manually loading the driver and running dhcpcd?
if that works add the driver to /etc/rc.d/rc.modules and it will get loaded at boot.

then you could add /sbin/dhcpcd to /etc/rc.d/rc.M or /etc/rc.d/rc.local to get it to automatically call dhcpcd at boot.

Are you sure hotplug is making it lock up? Try waiting a minute or two. For me it takes about that long.

No, I haven't yet. I'll give that a whirl tonight.



And WMD -

Your thought was worth a go... But it's been sitting at a frozen console, with zero activity for the last ten minutes. I'm gonna take that to be a hard lock. I remember managing to get around the problem with a new kernel. Hell, that'd probably solve my network card problem as well.

Heh, yep, that's a lockup. You should be able to load the modules manually and everything should work fine then.

What's your NIC?

Also chmod -x /etc/rc.d/rc.hotplug and you won't have to give the -nohotplug option.

hotplug is probably trying to load an incorrect module.