Re: roger's notebook nic

[Roger Searle]

Thanks Steve.  I understand all of what you say, but not sure how I'll 
go with implementing.   If this was windows, I'd get new drivers and 
install them in a flash.  All I can do right now is copy various emails 
to a folder for revisiting next week.  Maybe some further questions then.

Thanks for your suggestions. 

Regards,
Roger
Steve Holdoway wrote:

[snip]

 

8139too Fast Ethernet driver 0.9.26
eth0: RealTek RTL8139 Fast Ethernet at 0xd88f7000, 00:00:e2:9c:46:72, IRQ 3
eth0:  Identified 8139 chip type 'RTL-8139C'
   

There are a number of other drivers for this chipset. I _thought_ that
8139too.o was the best, but it may be that one of the other 8139
modules (rtl8139?) may work better. ( change the alias eth0 8139too to
alias eth0 rtl8139 after checking that the module is available ).
[snip]
 

PCI: No IRQ known for interrupt pin A of device 00:02.0. Probably buggy 
MP table.
NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0: transmit timed out
eth0: Tx queue start entry 4  dirty entry 0.
eth0:  Tx descriptor 0 is 00002000. (queue head)
eth0:  Tx descriptor 1 is 00002000.
eth0:  Tx descriptor 2 is 00002000.
eth0:  Tx descriptor 3 is 00002000.
eth0: Setting 100mbps full-duplex based on auto-negotiated partner 
ability 41e1.
   

[snip]

This is the problem. It's sort of working as it manages to negotiate
with your switch!
Does the BIOS say is's a plug and play one? If so, turn it off. 
Is APIC enabled in the BIOS?  If so, turn it off. 
Are you building your own kernel? If so, make sure APIC support is
disabled. Or force it with the noapic boot option in lilo .

The last thing that I can think of is that I did have a distro which
brought up the network before the pcmcia drivers, and this screwed
things up. To fix this, I made sure that the relevant symbolic links
in /etc/rc5.d were renumbered, ie link names are Sxxnetwork and
Syypcmcia, make sure that xx > yy.
Good luck!

Steve