Re: Intel D945GSEJT LAN and Debian not working

2009-11-12 Thread Jean-François Pirlet
 Strangely the system seems to be referring to squeeze instead of sid  
 (?).


Well, if you have used the testing-netinst, that's pretty normal (unless
you have configured your sources.list to Sid). Squeeze is the current
Testing distro. Sid is the Unstable distro.


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Intel D945GSEJT LAN and Debian not working

2009-11-11 Thread brian

It's an Atom board known as Johnstown.

Can't get the ethernet to work (it's a gigE, Realtek), the rest of the  
installation seems to work fine.


I was hoping someone else on the list has this board and has found a  
debian install iso which will work.


5.03 most definitely does not.  It installs the r8169 driver, which  
seems to be broken.


Any help _greatly_ appreciated (as you can tell by the time :-)

Brian





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Re: Intel D945GSEJT LAN and Debian not working

2009-11-11 Thread Alex Samad
On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 01:44:42AM -0800, brian wrote:
 It's an Atom board known as Johnstown.
 
 Can't get the ethernet to work (it's a gigE, Realtek), the rest of
 the installation seems to work fine.
 
 I was hoping someone else on the list has this board and has found a
 debian install iso which will work.
 
 5.03 most definitely does not.  It installs the r8169 driver, which
 seems to be broken.
have you tried getting the realtek driver and using it. I had to do this
for 2.6.25-~29 until the mainline r8169 came up to speed


 
 Any help _greatly_ appreciated (as you can tell by the time :-)
 
 Brian
 
 
 
 
 

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Re: Intel D945GSEJT LAN and Debian not working

2009-11-11 Thread brian



Hi Alex,

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 01:44:42AM -0800, brian wrote:

It's an Atom board known as Johnstown.

Can't get the ethernet to work (it's a gigE, Realtek), the rest of
the installation seems to work fine.

I was hoping someone else on the list has this board and has found a
debian install iso which will work.

5.03 most definitely does not.  It installs the r8169 driver, which
seems to be broken.



 have you tried getting the realtek driver and using it. I had to do  
this

 for 2.6.25-~29 until the mainline r8169 came up to speed

oh, where to begin.

the realtek page (curse them ) says that the kerner driver is just  
fine.


of course, the #...@$! idiots don't tell you which version of the kernel  
that applies to.  $...@!!! morons.


Then there's the problem that using the netinst install doesn't give  
you enough tools to be able to

build a driver anyway.

So I figure my best option is to use a full CD install of either  
debian testing or ubuntu 9.xx to get

the latest drivers in hopes that they will work.

I was hoping someone could identify a disty that would work for sure  
before I descend into hell once more.


I assume from your post that kernels = 2.26.30 work ?

And this is for a Johnstown board or some other board that you think  
has the same chipset ?


There seems to be a lack of coherent information about this stupid  
chipset.


realtek has just joined ati as something I will never spend money on  
again.  Intel is about to join that list too.


Intel's web page for the board says that Ubuntu 8.10 works with the  
native drivers.  8.10 is ancient, and is probably the

same vintage as Lenny, right ? So this thing should already be working.



Any help _greatly_ appreciated (as you can tell by the time :-)


I was up late goofing around with this.  Linux, still the same after  
all these years :-(


Brian



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Re: Intel D945GSEJT LAN and Debian not working

2009-11-11 Thread Jean-François Pirlet
 realtek has just joined ati as something I will never spend money on  
 again.  Intel is about to join that list too.

Huh, if you blacklist Realtek (Realtek chips are found almost
everywhere...), Intel and Ati, given that Ati belongs to AMD, it's
likely you won't spend much money on computers in the future :-)


 Intel's web page for the board says that Ubuntu 8.10 works with the  
 native drivers.  8.10 is ancient, and is probably the
 same vintage as Lenny, right ? So this thing should already be working.

No. 8.10 stands for 2008, October, whereas Lenny was released in
February, 2009. That being said, Lenny is the most vintage of these
distros (shipping with 2.6.26, whereas 8.10 is shipping 2.6.27).

Regards.


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Re: Intel D945GSEJT LAN and Debian not working

2009-11-11 Thread Brian denheyer



On Wed, 11 Nov 2009, Jean-François Pirlet wrote:


realtek has just joined ati as something I will never spend money on
again.  Intel is about to join that list too.


Huh, if you blacklist Realtek (Realtek chips are found almost
everywhere...), Intel and Ati, given that Ati belongs to AMD, it's
likely you won't spend much money on computers in the future :-)



maybe that's not a bad thing.  Then I won't be up late at night. :-)




Intel's web page for the board says that Ubuntu 8.10 works with the
native drivers.  8.10 is ancient, and is probably the
same vintage as Lenny, right ? So this thing should already be working.


No. 8.10 stands for 2008, October, whereas Lenny was released in
February, 2009. That being said, Lenny is the most vintage of these
distros (shipping with 2.6.26, whereas 8.10 is shipping 2.6.27).



So, more confusing.  Supposedly 8.10 works, so that would lead me to 
believe that Lenny should work.  It seems hard to believe that the driver 
broke from .26 to .27.  More than likely the #...@!^^ wankers at realtek 
rev'ed the chip and so what I have is misidentified or has some other 
ridiculous problem, i.e. it is not the same chip that the MB originally 
started shipping with. This is a common problem.


Realtek is everywhere and yet, miraculously, I seem to be the only one 
with this problem.  I found one other site, also trying to install Lenny, 
and they apparently fixed it with r8138. That didn't work for me.


And really, no one seems to know what's going on, including realtek, who's 
website says it works, but fails to tell you which version.  Very 
frustrating.  And unfortunately, after many years of linux, still very 
common.


Brian


Re: Intel D945GSEJT LAN and Debian not working

2009-11-11 Thread Alex Samad
On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 06:41:54AM -0800, brian wrote:
 
 
 Hi Alex,
 
 On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 01:44:42AM -0800, brian wrote:
 It's an Atom board known as Johnstown.
 

[snip]

 
 And this is for a Johnstown board or some other board that you think
 has the same chipset ?

I think you have read too much into my email, I have no experience with
this board, but I have had problems with realtek nic's before, and the
solution was to use the realtek driver.

can I suggest probably the easiest way to check is get a latest live cd
and boot from there, they normally have the newest kernels on them


 
 There seems to be a lack of coherent information about this stupid
 chipset.
 
 realtek has just joined ati as something I will never spend money on
 again.  Intel is about to join that list too.
 
 Intel's web page for the board says that Ubuntu 8.10 works with the
 native drivers.  8.10 is ancient, and is probably the
 same vintage as Lenny, right ? So this thing should already be working.
 
 
 Any help _greatly_ appreciated (as you can tell by the time :-)
 
 I was up late goofing around with this.  Linux, still the same after
 all these years :-(
 
 Brian
 
 
 

-- 
The United States Congress was right to renew the terrorist act -- the Patriot 
Act.

- George W. Bush
09/07/2006
Atlanta, GA


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Re: Intel D945GSEJT LAN and Debian not working

2009-11-11 Thread brian


On Nov 11, 2009, at 11:55 AM, Alex Samad wrote:

can I suggest probably the easiest way to check is get a latest live  
cd

and boot from there, they normally have the newest kernels on them



Yes !!! Problem solved. I am the proud owner of a Sid, or squeeze (?),  
installation.


I'd like to take a little time to explain what I did for those who  
fall into a similar situation.



I used this iso (The sid distro appears to use the 2.6.30 kernel):

http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/daily-builds/daily/arch-latest/i386/iso-cd/debian-testing-i386-netinst.iso

Overall I find the linking to all of the different versions somewhat  
confusing.  For example there is a link to weekly builds

which points to  a directory tree which does not have anything in it.

The problem is that getting the right vmlinuz and initrd.gz is  
important and I can't remember where I got them, because of all

the confusing links.  I'm pretty sure it was from here:

/debian/dists/sid/main/installer-i386/current/images/hd-media

I used the sysconfig method on a flash stick, which was very easy and  
worked exactly as appears in the installation

instructions.

Now here's the really important part:

I HAD TO UNPLUG THE POWER TO THE MOTHERBOARD.

Unbelievably the ethernet hardware seems to have gotten stuck and  
power off-on using the power button did NOT fix it.  The fact
that the ethernet could stay in such a state really points to how bad  
a job someone did on the design of  either the

motherboard or the LAN chip hardware.

The key to this problem, which I was slow to realize, was that lspci  
did NOT show the LAN pci device.


So I physically disconnected power, plugged it back in, and booted  
using the prepared filesystem.


Held my breath and the ethernet was detected !

Strangely the system seems to be referring to squeeze instead of sid  
(?).



Well, that was a pain :-(

I don't know whether one of my other install attempts would have  
worked had I realized that
the power needed to be physically disconnected.  I have seen this  
behavior on another computer and what is highly
coincidental is that it was also the ethernet which was having a  
problem on that computer.


I have had some hiccups and have noticed that several times when re- 
starting the installation I have to unplug the power.
Ah, quality Intel hardware.  Well at least it _mostly_ worked out  
of the box...


Brian






There seems to be a lack of coherent information about this stupid
chipset.

realtek has just joined ati as something I will never spend money on
again.  Intel is about to join that list too.

Intel's web page for the board says that Ubuntu 8.10 works with the
native drivers.  8.10 is ancient, and is probably the
same vintage as Lenny, right ? So this thing should already be  
working.




Any help _greatly_ appreciated (as you can tell by the time :-)


I was up late goofing around with this.  Linux, still the same after
all these years :-(

Brian





--
The United States Congress was right to renew the terrorist act --  
the Patriot Act.


- George W. Bush
09/07/2006
Atlanta, GA



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