Could 8139 module be corrupted?

[geertlpa]

I am both an old hand and new to Linux. This year is my 3rd year of experimenting with Linux yet so far I have ben unable to do it (whether it be Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse, Caldera (then), Slackware or now Gentoo) what I want it to. Yet I refuse to give up.

Gentoo came with a magazine I subscribe to. I like the idea of installing Linux from scrath instead of a ready make distro. So after reading the installation guide I felt confident enough to go ahead an give it a try. For once everything worked as explained in the docomentation.

As I said the documentation was spot on. every step clearly explained. The bootable CD found my network card and chosing a stage 2 tarball install I went from there. It took 2 days (A person needs to sleep and as someone running my own company I could not work continuous) until the compilation part was over. but then te problems started.

First I set up LILO as the bootloader but after booting all I got was a blank screen. I have installed LILO several times and apart from the latest version coming with Mandrake 9.1 it has always worked fine. Apparently not this time. OK back to the installation guide and install GRUB.

Still a blank screen but at least when I hit enter Gentoo loads. But here again things seem to wrong. Two error message fly by before I can read them but then I get this:
Insmod: /lib/modules/2.4.20-gentoo-r8/kernel/drivers/net/8139cp.o failed
This line comes twice then find more info in syslog or output from dmesg.

The 8139cp.o module is there and I am sure it was supposed to be part of the kernel and not loaded as a module. So I am already confused there.

Furthermore after going through all the syslog's that locate throws up I cannot find anything. A locate dmesg comes up empty + I thought that the start up messages are logged somewhere in /var/log/messages but apparently not on my Gentoo system. So I am at a loss. Where can I find these start up messages?

Maybe that might help me work out why my network card is apparently recognized (ifconfig show eth0) but the network does not work eventhough the whole system was downloaded during the install over my ADSL connection. Ping comes back with "network is unreachable".

So can someone get me back on my way. I am sure it is something small but it is now 3 weeks since I installed the system and I have been unable to find the problem that holds me back.

Thank you,

Geert Anthonis
Kaohsiung, Taiwan
_________________
"Problems are there to be made"

[Chris W]

You may be trying to load the wrong RTL8139 module. There are two: 8139cp and 8139too.

To get a better look at the error messages use the

[fleed]

What does just ifconfig tell you? Do you need to set the ip parameters to get it working?
You may be getting the error loading the module because it's already in the kernel, maybe the .o was left over from when it was built as a module?