[realtek] RealTek Ethernet not working under kernel 2.2.18

[Mark Phillips]

Hi,

I've just installed Debian 2.2r2 on my PC here at work. All is fine
except I can't get networking to work.  I believe the network card 
is based on the RTL8139 (RealTek) chipset.  Everything works fine 
under Windows, so the problem has to be a Linux one.  The rtl8139 
module loads okay.  Doing ifconfig shows that eth0 is up. 
The routing table has been set up.  Just that pinging the gateway 
results in 100% loss of packets.  I am also getting error messages, 
such as:

eth0: RTL8139  Interrupt line blocked, status 1.

eth0: Transmit timeout, status 0c 0005 media 00.
eth0: Tx Queue start entry 10 dirty entry 6.

I can think of a number of possibilities:

1. Perhaps I've configured things wrongly.  But I believe I've done
everything correctly and use the same settings as for Windows.

2. Perhaps there is a bug in the driver --- I would try upgrading to
kernel 2.4 but, catch 22 --- I need to be able to access the net to 
properly upgrade.  For now I am stuck with kernel 2.2.18something.

3. Interrupt conflict??  I don't think this is the problem but I
could be wrong.

4. Firewall not letting things through??  I doubt this is the problem. 
I haven't setup any firewall --- unless Debian has done it for me.  
Also I would expect different messages from ping if this were the case.

Well, they're the ideas I can think of.  Any suggestions would be most
welcome!

Cheers,

Mark.