No Network with Knoppix3.2 and RTL8139 nic...

[catfish]

FYI... PROBLEM SOLVED!!!!....
Simply booting with: "knoppix noapic" makes everything work.
From other sources on the net this issue appears to be systemic to debian and not directly related to knoppix.

Hope this info may help others who have similar troubles...

I'm very interested in this. The Knoppix cheat codes text does not list a noapic option, nor does it appear on the F2 help screen. Can you give us more details? Do you know what noapic actually does; what do you not have when you boot Knoppix this way? Can you provide the links that you found to this?

I found recently and reported in another thread that I was able to get past my network access problem by booting Knoppix with the expert option and selecting N for each option. I've now confirmed this back through all of my Knoppix CD's, the oldest being V3.1 8-August-02, although the CD used to work fine with the default boot. I also found that it is the scsi autoprobe that is triggering the problem in my case; if I hit return for autoprobe rather than n when asked the first question in expert mode my system fails the same way it does under default. I have no actual scsi device on the notebook but I do have a dvd/cdrw drive; I don't know yet if bypassing autoprobe causes me to not be able to write CD's (hard to experiment with this, there's something in the drive when I run knoppix and I'm not installing to hard disk so all that CD writing stuff in Knoppix does me little good). If anyone has insight on why the autoprobe feature now seems to conflict with the NIC (particlarly if you understand why it didn't before with the same CD) please let me know.

By the way, the noapic option when booting knoppix does not seem to help me. When I boot this way I still have the same problem with my NIC that I've previously reported.

I'm using knoppix 3.2 06/06/2003 and pressing F2 at the boot prompt does list "apic" on the "no {scsi, pcmcia,...} line (fourth line from bottom). APIC refers to Advance Programmable Interrupt Controller - the piece of h/w that arbitrates the hardware interrupts (IRQs). I believe specifying "noapic" changes the settings the kernel uses to configure the interrupt controller. In my case I assume it causes a "workaround" of some pecularity in the BIOS. I don't believe "noapic" causes any serious side-effects other than performance may suffer under heavy interrupt loads.

I don't have the exact reference that I found, but it suggested two things: make sure PnP OS is OFF in the BIOS settings, and try noapic with the kernal. A couple of other references I know are:
http://hypermail.idiosynkrasia.net/l...294.html<br />
http://www.pantek.com/library/linux/...pts.html<br />
BTW, I did try your suggestion of booting "expert" but it didn't change anything (I even attempted loading a different 8139too module from a floppy without success).

I also understand that linux treats CDR devices as scsi devices and will load a "scsi emulator" (ide-scsi) module if the device is actually an IDE device (lsmod should show ide-scsi). I'm afraid I have no speculation regarding how scsi autoprobe can mess the nic.