New Motherboard, Now I have no network (beyond the obvious)

MorphiusFaydal

OK, to replace my failing Shuttle AN35 N Ultra, I recently purchased an MSI K7N2 Delta2 Platinum motherboard, which utilizes the NVidia NForce2 Ultra 400 + MCP-RAID Chipset. This is the chipset with the GigaBit ethernet.

Now, I was (foolishly) hoping for my network to come up and work as normal after I had installed the motherboard (and this is the only change, I kept the same processor) and reinstalled WindowsXP and GRUB.

Naturally, eth0 failed to come up.

"AH-ha!" says I, being the (reasonably) un-stupid Gentoo-Linux user I am, "This motherboard has a different chip!"

Now, I'm failing to get a 2.6.8.1 kernel compiled, and I'm wondering, does this ethernet chip even have any Linux support? Or will I have to go out and buy a PCI 10/100 Ethernet card at Best Buy? And, if it is supported, what do I need to enable in 2.6.7 or 2.6.8.1 to get it to work? If it's not supported, can anyone recommend a good, cheap 10/100 card for me?

Thanks in advance,

Chris
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Robelix · Posted: Sat Oct 30, 2004 11:57 am Post subject:

emerge nforce-net should help

if not:
cheap: anything with realtek
good: intel etherexpress

robelix
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MorphiusFaydal · Posted: Sat Oct 30, 2004 4:40 pm Post subject:

the 2004.3-test9 livecd will bring up network, does that have the nofrce-net package on there?

and, as i dont have network actually in gentoo, should i just boot the livecd and chroot into my install to emerge nforce-net?

TY
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Admiral LSD · Posted: Sat Oct 30, 2004 5:49 pm Post subject:

You don't need the nforce-net package anymore as the kernel has a driver for nForce LAN chipsets (the latest 2.6 kernels even have support for gigabit - provided by nVidia no less). It's called "forcedeth and you can find it under:

Device Drivers -> Networking support -> Ethernet (10 or 100Mbit) -> Reverse Engineered nForce Ethernet support (EXPERIMENTAL)

Don't worry about the "(EXPERIMENTAL)" tag, it's been working great for me pretty much since I started using it which was shortly after it first came out. I had one issue with it but that was down to bad network cables more than any fault in the driver.
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MorphiusFaydal · Posted: Mon Nov 01, 2004 10:33 pm Post subject:

i've been using forcedeth on my old nforce2 board, but it stopped working after i put in the new mobo, and the settings are the same...

should i just recompile the module?
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dsd · Posted: Mon Nov 01, 2004 11:07 pm Post subject:

forcedeth supports it. just use 2.6.8 or newer (preferably 2.6.9

)
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MorphiusFaydal · Posted: Tue Nov 02, 2004 5:23 pm Post subject:

thanks, i'll do it right when i get home (thank god portage pulled down the 2.6.8.1 sources.... not that im surprised)
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dsd · Posted: Tue Nov 02, 2004 6:37 pm Post subject:

i'd suggest 2.6.9, since if you try and report any problems with 2.6.8, well, you can guess what the immediate response will be...
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