[tulip] retry: Why won't this card work?

[Steve Throckmorton]

I know this is a tulip mailing list, and this isn't a tulip card; it's a
Netgear FA311.  But I couldn't find an appropriate list, and I see a lot of
questions here that turn out not to have much to do with the specific card, so
here goes.

I am running RH6.2, kernal 2.2.14.  I compiled natsemi.o and pci-scan.o from
the source I downloaded from this site, and put them into
/lib/modules/2.2.14-5.0/net using install.  I can see the files in File
Manager.  I attempted to set up the network using linuxconf, but that program
didn't show the drivers in the list of possibles even when they were in the
subdirectory with the rest of the modules--that was the first hint of a
problem.  When I tried to get linuxconf to execute the system changes to set up
the NIC, it acted very strangely, either doing nothing or hanging GNOME. 
However, some things got done, as the 'alias eth0 natsemi.o' line is in
conf.modules, and dep.modules has a line in it that seems to me to establish
the natsemi.o's dependency on pci-scan.o.

I gave up on linuxconf and tried insmod, which appears to install the modules
(if I load them in the correct order).  But it didn't help.  Ifconfig only
shows eth0 if I use the -a option to force it do display all devices--including
the non-functioning ones :(  What's more, modprobe refuses to acknowledge the
modules /lib/modules/2.2.14-5.0/net/natsemi.o  or ../pci-scan.o   It says
'module not found' when I try to load them using modprobe, but if I install
them with insmod first, modprobe can remove them using the -r option.  

In my /var/logs/messages file, I see that on every boot the eth0 initialization
fails for the same reason:  modprobe complains it can't find the specified
modules.  Since linuxconf doesn't see them and modprobe doesn't see them, I
think there must be something basic and non-driver specific at work here.  Can
anybody help me with this?

Steve T.


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