Hi,

I booted knoppix on a Biostar TForce 550 motherboard with an onboard Marvell 88e1116 PHY gigabit ethernet nic and a PCI realtek RTL8169 S-32 card.

I had to add the following on the boot command line:
knoppix noapic (or acpi=noirq)
otherwise the screen would remain black and the system would not boot.

The realtek RTL8169 S-32 PCI card would have its LEDs blinking while booting but they suddenly stopped when the boot process reached "Starting udev hotplug hardware detection".

Anyway, neither one of the nics work. However, if I use older 3com cards I have network access.

I've had the exact same problem using the Gentoo distribution on the same machine. Details are in this forum post (please have a look at it as it contains more details):

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t...+ethernet.html

Both chips seem to be "supported" by the linux kernel. Is it true?
Is it a udev version problem?
How can I solve this?