On Mon, Apr 16, 2001 at 10:16:07PM +0200, Henrik Jensen wrote:
| Hi,
| I´ve spent the entire evening looking for instructions on how to make a
| network adapter work, but I didn´t find the info i needed, so I subscribed
| to this list in hope of getting some qualified help :-)
What qualifications do I have ..., hmm, ..., I don't know! <wink>
A good site to look for stuff is www.scyld.com. That is Donald
Becker's employer, and he is the guy who wrote most of the Linux
networking stuff. The site probably doesn't have newbie oriented
information, but it does contain a lot of good data on various
hardware and the related kernel modules.
| I found a command (something like "configure eth0 192.168.1.n netmask
| 255.255.255.0 up") for configuring the card, but I was informed that the
| adapter did not exist.
The command would be 'ifconfig', but that is used after the hardware
exists.
| What do I do? How do I probe for hardware? How do I 'make it work'?
What kind of card do you have? Do you know the brand/model of it? If
so, someone here probably knows what chipset it uses, and can specify
which kernel module supports it. For example, I have a LinkSys
LNE100TX card. It uses the DEC Tulip chipset. The 'tulip' module is
the correct one for this card. To set it up I do the following :
o switch to root
o edit /etc/modutils/network_adapter
# the exact filename doesn't really matter, as long as it is
# in /etc/modutils, if you want a more in-depth explanation
# of /etc/modutils just ask
o include the line
alias eth0 tulip
This line says that when a program attempts to access 'eth0', send it
to the 'tulip' module.
Some other common cards :
Netgear/Linksys/D-Link ISA cards : NE2000 clone : 'ne' module
D-Link DFE-530TX+ : Realtek chipset : 'rtl8139' module
D-Link DFE-530TX : Via-Rhine chipset : 'via-rhine' module
In some older machines that only have ISA buses I have the Netgear
NE2000 adapter. Since the ISA bus isn't quite as good as a PCI bus
the alias line for that card looks like :
alias eth0 ne
options ne io=0x300
which says : "use the 'ne' module for 'eth0', its base io address is
0x300".
HTH,
-D
