Hello,
I am currently setting up a Compaq Deskpro 2000 Pentium 166 MMX as a Debian
box. It has a 3Com ethernet card, which doesn't seem to want to work with
DHCP. I'm sure it must be a compatibility problem between Debian and the
computer, because I had no problem using DHCP with Debian on a different
computer, nor did I have any trouble with DHCP on this computer with
FreeBSD. Here is what is detected during startup:
3Com 3c905 Boomerang 100baseTx at 0x1440, 00:60:08:14:86:44 IRQ 3
8k word-wide RAM 3:5 Rx:Tx split, autoselect/MII interface
MII transceiver found at addres 24, status 786d
Enabling bus-master transmitters and whole-frame receives
Then it apparently loads "via-rhine.c v1.01" about 5 times.
Unfortunately, when I try to configure my network during install,
DHCP/BOOTP doesn't work, nor do the defaults or my best guesses in the
manual setup. I've had trouble with PnP BIOS and ethernet cards with
Debian before, so I played around in the BIOS, but there aren't a lot of
options. I can pretty much only enable/disable bus mastering, and
enable/disable the card itself. It was on IRQ 11 but the BIOS suggested I
move it to IRQ 3.
Could this be a BIOS conflict? Is there an incompatibility with my network
card? Why won't DHCP/BOOTP function properly with Debian?
In any case, I really like the feel of Debian, and I want to run it on my
system. Somebody please help! I don't want to have to install FreeBSD!
Thank you,
Justin Jones
