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Oh, something I forgot to ask. Only having 3Com cards I can't test if it is driver related or a problem in the kernel.
Does anyone else see anything like this in the dmesg output and from ifconfig even if the NIC appears to work?
If so is it something other than a 3Com NIC?
Update. On the PII BX machine, the one with the unresponsive NIC under 5.x, I flattened a windows partition, installed Debian woody kernel 2.2.20 and upgraded it to testing/etch kernel 2.6.16-17. This displays exactly the same results as knoppix, so it's not something that's been added by knoppix. Something new from dmesg is the error "ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready". Also the address displayed by the 3c59x driver is always the same (c081c000) on every boot.
I see a lot of people have read this thread but no replies. Has no-one else has seen this or am I the only one foolish enough to attempt to use Linux with 3Com NICs?! Is it possible I have the only three machines that exhibit this behaviour? ;) Is the 3Com driver the only one to display this address? I'd almost buy another (non-3Com) NIC just to find some answers to these questions. Though I now believe it's a kernel and/or driver issue so probably really fall into the Knoppix remit...
Zrebel, Klaus also said it could be a udev issue when I mentioned it to him, it being new to 5.x. I had a look at the source code for 2.6.11-9 and 2.6.17-7 and the 3c59x driver has changed a bit, specifically in the area of the io base address which might explain it. The top 16 bits of the address reported by the driver look suspiciously like a memory address (lower 16 bits do look like io addr) and is within the range of addresses of the driver as shown by "cat /proc/kallsyms|grep 3c59x". I don't know the internal gubbins of Linux that well but the driver code looks ok. lspci, hwsetup, /proc/pci all report the same (correct) io address so it would seem like the PCI settings are being mangled somewhere between the kernel and the driver. modprobe?
As this is getting OT for knoppix where is the best place to report this? debian.org?
Update 2. Tested PII BX machine with Knoppix 4.0.2 CD (I should have realised I'd not tested this earlier). Odd results. The NIC fails to function exactly the same way as later kernels but the io base address shown by the 3c59x module and ifconfig is 0x6800, the normal expected address. 4.0.2 is kernel 2.6.12. Also tried Kanotix 04-2005 and Helix 1.7. Both appear to use the same 2.6.14-kanotix-9 kernel. NIC fails to functions as before and the address shown is the strange 32bit one. I tried Debian kernels 2.6.15-1-486, in case it was a 686 quirk, upto the latest 2.6.17-1-686. All fail the same way as previously described. I read that someone was having problems with drivers compiled using gcc 4 (I think it was this forum but can't find it again) so I recompiled the 2.6.17 kernel using gcc 3.3.6. Exact same results.
I'm beginning to think that something broke around 2.6.12 that stopped this machine working. After that something else caused the strange 32bit address thing but it isn't enough to stop my other machines from working. That is, the two things may not be necessarily connected.
I've taken this much further that I originally expected. I can't do much more unless I delve into the source code. 'Spose it's one way to get to know Linux better...
Still on-one else with something similar?