Yet another broadcom nic hassle

**fatso** · 06-19-2003, 12:16 PM

1st, Knoppix is a Godsend!!!
(Where do I line up to butt-smootch the developer???)

In fact, if I can ever get my silly onboard nic to work, I think I'll ditch Microcrap Winblows entirely (well, except for games....har!)

Ok, enuff psycho-babble...

Like so many others I've seen in these threads, I have a Broadcom 440x onboard nic problem....Knoppix fails to detect, and I'm sure it's due to an IRQ problem. Trouble is, I have no idea how to solve the conflict.

When I 1st boot up Knoppix, I see this at the top of the screen:
"PCI: Device 00:1f:1 not available because of resource collisions"

Upon investigating the dmesg, I also found this:
"PCI: Sharing IRQ 5 with 00:1f.1"

I don't know if these messages have anything to do with my nic, since Winblows reports that my nic is on IRQ 10.

I've gone into my BIOS and tried several things:
- Plug & Play Aware OS = NO (this has solved hassles in the past with redhat)
- changed APIC setting to PIC
- set ALL ISA IRQ's to "NA" (ain't got no stinkin' ISA devices)

I've also tried using combinations of the following cheats:
noapic nosmp nopcmcia dma noscsi lang=en screen=800x600 pci=biosirq

....still no nic.

I have run all the following commands in a shell (both root and regular user) :
netcardconfig = "No supported device found"
modprobe tg3
cat /proc/pci

None of the above commands gave me anything I could see as useful.

So what do I do now?
I really, really, really (have I said really?) want to use Knoppix, but without net access, it's viturtually useless to me.

Also, could someone please tell me how I go about compiling the module for for my nic? I downloaded the source file posted in another related thread (bcm4400-source_1.0.1-1_all.deb).

BTW: I'm running Knoppix v3.2 (2003-06-06) from the CD, but I have myconfig and home on my HDD.

My board is an ASUS P4PE.

Any/all help would be greatly appreciated!

**rickenbacherus** · 06-19-2003, 03:40 PM

Originally Posted by fatso

Also, could someone please tell me how I go about compiling the module for for my nic? I downloaded the source file posted in another related thread (bcm4400-source_1.0.1-1_all.deb).

First of all- thanks for posting what you've already tried to do in order to get this NIC working. It sure saves alot of time and headache.

You don't have to compile a .deb just install it. I prefer to use Midnight Commander but there are other utilities like Synaptic.

As root:

# mc
Then just browser to your .deb, hit enter on the .deb and it will open up. Arrow down to Install and stand back! Of course that might not do a bit of good if your NIC can't get an IRQ.

Code:

~$ cat /proc/interrupts

           CPU0
  0:    3632800          XT-PIC  timer
  1:      12522          XT-PIC  keyboard
  2:          0          XT-PIC  cascade
  8:          1          XT-PIC  rtc
  9:      11459          XT-PIC  ESS Solo1
 10:      65298          XT-PIC  usb-ohci
 11:    3091792          XT-PIC  HP J2973, radeon@PCI:1:5:0
 14:      73871          XT-PIC  ide0
 15:          9          XT-PIC  ide1
NMI:          0
LOC:          0
ERR:          0
MIS:          0

So you see it is possible to share IRQ's-my NIC and video card seem to coexist together quite happily. Can you change the IRQ of another device or move a card to another slot maybe?

**fatso** · 06-19-2003, 05:32 PM

thanks for the reply & instructions...much appreciated!

as for moving a card to another slot, all slots except the agp slot are empty already. NIC and sound are onboard.
Thanks for the suggestion, though.

**fatso** · 06-19-2003, 09:02 PM

BAH! To hell with the onboard crap....I put in a linksys nic, and everything's peachy!

Any of you others out there having these hassles may want to consider taking the same action....all my troubles went away, and now all that's left to do is enjoy Knoppix!!!!

Bye-bye, Winblows!

**IceCrMan** · 03-12-2005, 08:03 AM

I have Knoppix 3.7 and I had this problem. I found that the 2.6 kerrnel detected the network adaptor and the 2.4 did not. On the boot screen type " knoppix26 " without the quotes. And then press return(enter) key. This may take a moment to load. Mine takes on average of 5 min. Using this may help get you connected. It worked for me.

**Harry Kuhman** · 03-12-2005, 08:29 AM

Originally Posted by IceCrMan

... This may take a moment to load. Mine takes on average of 5 min.......

That seems way too long unless it's a very old system (like under 200 mhz) or memory starved (like 128 meg or less). And if it's an old system then I expect the 2.4 knerrel would have the support for the NIC as well. You might try "knoppix26 nodma" and see if that improves your boot time. But I really expect that your system supports DMA OK, but that your system is having trouble with your CD and having to do a lot of rereading and error correcting to boot up. My suggestion would be to burn another CD at a nice slow speed like 4x and see if that CD doesn't boot faster.

No one ever seems to believe me when I state that burning at a slow speed is important, so as support for my argument I just tested this on an old system I have handy. I usually run the 2.4 kernel on this system (as well as on my notebook), but I just booted 2.6 as a test. The system is a 380 mhz AMD-K6 with 384 meg of memory. Timing from when I hit return after typing knoppix26 and when the Konquror window was completely up and displaying the bird and the system was ready for input, it took this system 2 minutes, 25 seconds. Obviously different hardware detection can affect things, but any faster system should generally boot faster.

**IceCrMan** · 03-15-2005, 06:17 PM

I burned another cd at the slower speed and it worked. Now I'm booting in 1 min. 53 secs.( using the same method as yours ) Also , this time I used a new blank disk instead of one that I had written to a few times. Great tip !! Thank you.

**Harry Kuhman** · 03-15-2005, 09:23 PM

Thanks very much for the confirmation.

**khinch** · 09-02-2006, 04:26 PM

Originally Posted by Harry Kuhman

No one ever seems to believe me when I state that burning at a slow speed is important

It's funny you say that. My Honda Accord Bose CD player just hates home made CDs, but plays commercial ones fine. The slower I burn the CDs the less it jumps. Brand also makes a difference. Some brands it won't play at all, others it plays fine, but only if burned at a very slow speed.