knoppix -> Realtek 8139 problems connecting to home lan

[willempie]

Hi... Someone out there willing to help me ? I 've browsed this forum and a lot others to find a solution... in vain.

I 'm a linux newbie, but liked to convince myself that it 's just better than Windows... Having a difficult time with it. I Installed Fedora, that was a nice smooth install, had internet acces and lan immediately.
But... It ran significantly slower than knoppix. (200MMX 150MB ram)

So... I installed knoppix to my harddisk, but I can 't get my internet connection nor lan to work. I connect to a W2K pc via a cross over cable, same thing under fedora did the trick...

Some things I already tried:

• knoppix=noapci at boot didn 't help
  pump -i fails (whatever that means)
  lspci does list my ethernetcard (RTL 8139/...C/...C+) rev10
  lsmod doesn 't list 8139too (which I think is the driver for that card ???)
  when used modprobe 8139too, lsmod lists it, with a 0 next to it...
  netcardconfig fails to send dhcp
  the lisa network wizard can 't find a network interface
  ifconfig -a returns almost everywhere a 0 except for txqueuelen: 1000

If someone can help me with this one, I'll be able to continue exploring linux... A nice tutorial about what modules are, how to load them, how drivers are used in linux etc.. would be nice too... I 'm willing to do the work myself, but am really stuck rightnow !

[baldyeti]

try "knoppix noapic" (no equal sign!)

[willempie]

Hi, thank you for your quick answer... I tried the noapic without =, like it 's described in the boot options. But that didn 't gave any changes...
in the mean time, I tried a networkcard from a friend (D-link), and now the dhcp broadcast succeeds. So, getting an IP adress, starting the samba server and accessing the windows pc works as well. But... when I try accessing the internet via the network, this time I get the error (translated) "Server timed out, connection from <url> was on port 80."

Does anyone have any suggestions on:

• How to get the realtek to work (did work already on Fedora)
  How to solve the server time out problem

Thanks !

[icoczar]

i have that realtek. didn' thave to anything. setup is phone to dlink router to realtec nic. only thing i can't get going is the d-link dwl-122 usb wifi going on my other pc.

[willempie]

I tried a D-link nic and that one works problemless...
thanks for the reply 's !

[Harry Kuhman]

...
in the mean time, I tried a networkcard from a friend (D-link), and now the dhcp broadcast succeeds. So, getting an IP adress, starting the samba server and accessing the windows pc works as well. But... when I try accessing the internet via the network, this time I get the error (translated) "Server timed out, connection from <url> was on port 80."

Does anyone have any suggestions on:

• How to get the realtek to work (did work already on Fedora)
  How to solve the server time out problem

It sounds very much like your Realtek NIC now has the problem I've written of in several other posts here particularly here: http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2117 and here: http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2164

What flavor of Windows have you run on the computer with that NIC? Have you accepted the "security updates" that Microsoft releases?

As to a suggestion on how to get the Realtek to work: Yes, I believe that you can get it to work, and would very strongly encourage you to do so and document everything you can. Having this problem with an easily removable and very common PCI NIC rather than one built into a notebook (as happened to me) should be a big help. At least you can try doing things that I'm not willing to do to my $1000+ notebook. Once you have read through the above threads I would suggest that you go to http://www.scyld.com/diag/index.html and download all of the tools you can find for your NIC, particularly ftp://ftp.scyld.com/pub/diag/rtl8139-diag.c. I would suggest doing the following: Dump the current contents of the configuration eeprom for your NIC. If you can find someone else with the same NIC, particularly if it works under Knoppix (or if it's new and has never run under Windows), get them to dump their NIC eeprom too. You should be able to replace the eeprom settings in your NIC with the eeprom settings for a working NIC, after making changes to allow for the different MAC addresses stored in the NIC eeprom. Also you may find that there is an "emergency reset" feature in the diag that should (in theory) get your NIC back into a safe configuration (hint: don't just check the built in help, read through the C code, I've found more features in these diags than the minimal /? feature documents). Since we're talking about a $5 NIC here rather than a $1000 notebook, I would urge you to try this emergency reset feature (after you document what the eeprom contains).

If you do the above, please report back what happened, sucess or failure. And if you get the NIC working again, please do a few things:

• Post back here the eeprom dumps for both the failing configuration and the working configuration.
  
  AFTER you test under Knoppix, run Windows again and then see if Knoppix still can use the NIC.
  
  Assuming that the NIC still works under Knoppix (I think it will), download and apply the current security updates and then see if Knoppix can still boot.

Note as of 6/4/2004. The www.scyld.com website has changed and the http URL given for it above no longer works. The site indicates that they are making changes and the diagnostics links may be back at some point. The FTP site still does seem to be working, so the FTP link for this diagnostic is good, and other diagnostics may well be accessed by logging into the fpt site and searching for them.