ethernet

[Superman3332001]

I was wondering if there was anyone who knows of a good ethernet card that works well with linux mandrake 10.0.

Thanks

[sybil]

If you're talking straight ethernet, most will work fine. Wireless is another story...............
I have hanging around a Kingston kne100tx (I think), an Aopen (?realtek chipset), SMC - not sure which one, and various onboard nic's - they've all worked with no extra configuration. The only one that didn't get detected was the onboard gigabyte nic (Nvidia) with plain debian. All other distros have detected it. If you have any hanging around, just try it. It'll probably work.
You might be interested in this:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/index.php
It's a hardware compatibility forum, with member's experiences, ratings and tips for getting different hardware working.

[Superman3332001]

Well the one i am working with is a Biostar Motherboard model M7VIQ and is onboard lan

[ultrabuzz]

If this (http://www.biostar-usa.com/mbdetails.asp?model=m7viq) is your board then it has VIA VT6103 onboard lan. I believe it uses via-rhine driver.
Is your driver loaded at all ? Be root, open up a console and type:
lsmod
Do you see a line with via-rhine in it ?

Post back.

See, the basic idea behind getting your lan card going is loading a proper driver, configuring and starting the interface with ifconfig. Once working and tested, you probably want to load it at boot time.

[Superman3332001]

Ok I typed lsmod and here is what I found.

via-rhine 20520

mii 4992 1 via-rhine

[sybil]

How are you planning to connect to the internet? Are you using a router, and are you planning to use dhcp or a static network address?

[Superman3332001]

I have a cable modem through Rogers cable.. So does it look like I have all the drivers I need so far to get my internet up and running. :) Well the guy I talked to said I have to use a DHCP. I am on rogers highspeed lilte.

[sybil]

It does. You should be able to connect without any other configuration. Did I see you were using Mandrake 10 or am I dreaming? Try shutting down, connecting to the cable modem and restart.

[Superman3332001]

LOL. Nope your not dreaming. I am connected directly from my modem to my nic card.

[sybil]

So are you connecting? :)

[Superman3332001]

Nope not yet. It says in the task bar Network down Click here to configure

[sybil]

Okay, in the gui, check under System in the menu. You want the Mandrake Control Center. Go to the Network and Internet section. You should be able to configure it from there. I'm going to quickly install Mandrake - makes it easier to compare settings.

[Superman3332001]

Okay the only spot where I have problem is figuring out about the DHCP address,etc and making sure eveything is entered right.

[Superman3332001]

When i setup my internet connection I chose

Cable connection
Network Interface Eth0 viatechnologies (rhine II 10/100)
Auto IP bootTP/IP (Left Blank)
DHCP Adress
Track network (Left Blank)
Network Hotplugging (checked)
Start at Boot (unchecked)
In advanced

DHCP client :

Host name: idn.phub.net.cable.rogers.com

zeroconf host name: net
Network needs to be restarted

Yes or no

Do you see anything that needs to be changed?

[sybil]

You do want to start at boot. When you've done that, do an ifconfig eth0 in a terminal and see what the output is.

[Superman3332001]

Okay I did that and here is what I got

Linkencap: ethernet HWaddr00:e0:4c:9D:21:75
inter6 addr:fe80::2e0:4cff:fe9d:2175/64score:link
upbroadcast running multicast MTU:1500 metric 1
RX Packets:0 errors:0 dropped: 425 overruns:0 frame:0
Tx Packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 Carrier:0
Collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
Rx bytes 0 (0.0 b) tx bytes:0 (0.0 b)
Interrupt:16 base address :0xec00

Is there anything there that needs to be fixed? If so where and how?

[sybil]

You're not sending anything. Are the link lights for the network blinking?
What's in the file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifconfig-eth0

[Superman3332001]

okay. Here is what is in my ifconfig-eth0 file

Device=eth0
BOOTPROTO=DHCP
ONBOOT=YES
MII_NOT_SUPPORTED=NO
WIRELESS_ENC_KEY=""
NEEDHOSTNAME=YES

Does everything look ok there?

[ultrabuzz]

You got no ip.
Open console and try typing:
dhcpcd eth0

[Superman3332001]

I tried that one and got an error saying command could not be found

[Superman3332001]

Yes btw the lights were flickering on my modem :) any suggestions?

[ultrabuzz]

Well, if you want to configure your ethernet connection via dhcp, you need to have some kind of dhcp client installed. Check your distribution if it came with one, if not get and install one.

[Superman3332001]

How do I find out if I have one installed.

[ultrabuzz]

I don't use Mandrake myself however I doubt that any modern distro comes without a dhcp client installed by default. There are two commonly used clients: dhcpcd and dhclient. Easy way to ckeck which one you have would be running:
/sbin/dhcpcd -v
or
/sbin/dhclient -v
as root.
At least one of those should return output.

[Superman3332001]

Thanks everyone for your help. I finally decided to switch versions of Linux and now running kubuntu and got connected to the internet no problem.

I will post messages if I run into any problems or have any questions about this version of linux.