Compiling rtl8139 module?/What ethernet card to buy?


Subject: Compiling rtl8139 module?/What ethernet card to buy?
From: James H Membrez (membrez@cats.UCSC.EDU)
Date: Thu Jul 26 2001 - 16:40:06 MDT


For those who have been having problems compiling ethernet drivers, here,
for what it is worth, is our experience:

My son and I have been trying to get the ethernet card in his SuperMac
C500 to work with YDL 2.0. The card is a NE2000 clone (rtl8029 chip).
After many failed attempts at compiling the driver (which we downloaded
from the Scyld.com site, along with pci-scan.c, pci-scan.h, and
kern_compat.h), we were finally able to get a successful compilation. The
compile command at the end of the driver source code was this:

"gcc -DMODULE -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -O6 -c ne2k-pci.c
-I/usr/src/linux/drivers/net/"

That did not work. However, Donald Becker has a discussion on problems
compiling driver source code for Red Hat 7.0 configurations. Since, as I
understand it, YDL 2.0 is based on that distribution, I added the
following statement to the compile command as recommended by D. Becker:

"-I/usr/src/linux/include"

At that point, the driver compiled and, upon rebooting, ethernet (eth0)
was successfully initialized. We are new at this, so I can't really
explain why it worked or what is going on.

Unfortunately, that has not solved the problem, since we still can not
make a network connection (yes, all the config files are correct). A
statement at the end of the dmesg log says something about "PCI BIOS has
not enabled ethernet adapter". We don't know what that means. At this
point, we have suspended all efforts at getting the card to work. Anyone
have any ideas on this?

Thanks.

James Membrez
Adrian Membrez



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