I have just installed Debian 2.2.12 on my Pentium 150 and have spent an entire day trying to get my LAN card working for longer than 5 seconds.
It is a Kingston KNE100TX, using a DS21143 chip manufactured by Intel. Several documents say the tulip driver should work although Greg Siekas mentions on his web site (http://www.bmen.tulane.edu/~siekas/linux-tulip-information/tulip.html) that some versions of tulip have had problems with the -43. My symptoms: The NIC activity light blinks constantly, as though there was a lot of traffic. This appears to be bogus, since when I shutdown it continues to blink; I can even reboot without it losing a beat. (Turning off the power does reset it!) I believe my software configuration is OK, since dmesg shows nothing suspicious and--get this!--if I "ifconfig down" and then "ifconfig up" again the manic blinking stops for about 5 seconds. In fact, by recalling and entering a "ping" command immediately after coming back up, I see I have a successful connection! The pings start timing out when the manic blinking starts again. I should mention the exact same hardware works fine under Windoze 98. Under Linux, "ifconfig" shows the card using the same irq and memory as it did under Windoze. I got the source code for the 4/14/99 version of tulip from Greg's page. It compiles fine, but I can't install it because it was "compiled for kernel 2.0.36" and I'm using 2.2.12. I can't figure out where the 2.0.36 comes from; the only linux kernel headers I can "find" (and therefore these must be the ones gcc uses? how is this configured?) are in /usr/src/kernel-headers-2.2.12/include/linux where UTS_RELEASE is correctly defined as 2.2.12. So... Can anyone give me a hint on how to compile tulip to run under 2.2.12? Or any hints on what else to look for that could cause this strange problem? Thanks --Ray Zarling [EMAIL PROTECTED]
