How to control IRQ selection on PnP cards?

[rafial]

I'm helping a friend install Knoppix on his machine, and we are currently stumped by the following:

He's got two PnP cards (and SB compatible sound card, and a SMC NE2000 compatible ethernet card). His system uses a PS/2 style mouse.

On CD boot, or on boot from the hard drive, the PS/2 mouse is unusable, because one of the PnP cards is always configured to IRQ 12 (whichever one loads second). However, if we boot from the HD with "ne" removed from /etc/modules, and then manually "modprobe ne" after the boot is done, the ethernet card nicely configures up on IRQ9, and all three devices (net, sound, mouse) work together.

We're trying to figure out how the correct selection can be made a boot time. We've done some experimenting with isapnp.conf, but it seems like its being ignored on boot. (or we are doing something wrong).

One other piece of info, in case it matters. We've not been able to get dual boot with Windows working off the mbr, so he's currently using a boot floppy to start Linux off the HD.

Any suggestions for what the correct way to solve this problem might be?

[Stephen]

I'm helping a friend install Knoppix on his machine, and we are currently stumped by the following:

He's got two PnP cards (and SB compatible sound card, and a SMC NE2000 compatible ethernet card). His system uses a PS/2 style mouse.

On CD boot, or on boot from the hard drive, the PS/2 mouse is unusable, because one of the PnP cards is always configured to IRQ 12 (whichever one loads second). However, if we boot from the HD with "ne" removed from /etc/modules, and then manually "modprobe ne" after the boot is done, the ethernet card nicely configures up on IRQ9, and all three devices (net, sound, mouse) work together.

We're trying to figure out how the correct selection can be made a boot time. We've done some experimenting with isapnp.conf, but it seems like its being ignored on boot. (or we are doing something wrong).

One other piece of info, in case it matters. We've not been able to get dual boot with Windows working off the mbr, so he's currently using a boot floppy to start Linux off the HD.

Any suggestions for what the correct way to solve this problem might be?

Try editing the /etc/modutils/aliases file as root and adding these lines:

# Added by me for ne netcard
alias eth0 ne
options ne irq=9

Then you would still as root update-modules to update the modules.conf with the alias and reboot to see if it works. If it does not work then edit the /etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh and add the line:

modprobe ne irq=9

You would just have to reboot to try this and you should have commented out or removed the first suggestion and ran the update-modules again to restore the settings.

For the dual boot could you post the file /etc/lilo.conf, details as to whether you used the option to install it to the MBR during install, any errors you may have had and the output of the command fdisk -l as root.