At work nearly all of the machines come with Intel EtherExpress Pro PCI
ethernet cards (with an 82557 chip), and even though a few coworkers told
me that the only way to get on the network with linux would be to buy a
different card (buy?!), I managed to find a link to an EEPro driver through
the Ethernet HOWTO.. (http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/eepro100.html)
So now, after putting eepro100.c in /usr/src/linux/drivers/net, and doing
one little modification to the makefile in that directory (to compile and
link the eepro100 object), I attempted to compile EEPro support into a
2.1.6 kernel on a coworker's machine... It seemed too easy.. and sure
enough, no notice of any ethernet device comes up during bootup, and it
doesnt show up in /proc/devices... However, in /proc/pci it shows the
card, waiting for me to take advantage of it.. If I only knew how...
I did try specifying ether=0,0,eth0 AND ether=9,0xfce0,eth0 as a lilo boot
option, even though a howto says that PCI devices obtain their
interrupts and IOs automagically (I got the numbers I'm using from
/proc/pci). I tried it anyway, and still nothing happened... No notice of
eth0 during bootup at all.
I'm sure I'm missing something that I should have done, so please someone
point it out to me.. I will be very appreciative (its probably something
extra I have to do to turn on the EEPro driver during the kernel compile..
(something like that?)). I know that the instructions in the eepro100.c
source code say to compile it as a module, but since the only >=1.3.4x
kernel source code (what the driver needs) available to me was 2.1.6, and
since all I have at the moment is the basic Slackware 3.0 installation,
inserting modules into a 2.1.6 kernel (without the EEPro driver inside of
course) doesnt seem to work, returning an error code...
I would gladly upgrade my module package and everything else if I could
get on the network :)... Kind of an chicken & egg problem..
Thanks again,
-Vermont Rutherfoord
vermont@gate.net
Of course, speaking only for myself and whatever