Getting ethernet working on ASUS P4P800-VM board [SOLVED]
I thought I'd posted this here for reference and future googling by
others with this problem but clearly I forgot. There are other posts
about sound, SATA and other things with the board but not, that I can
see about this particular problem. I was trying to install Woody onto
this new machine and couldn't get the ethernet working. Solution was
relatively painless and GPL I think so here it is.
The ethernet adapter built into the motherboard is an Intell 82562EZ
according to the manual. Intel had the driver under the GPL: search
for 82562 and linux on the support page:
http://support.intel.com/support/index.htm?iid=HPAGE+header_support&;
That gets you e100-2.1.15.tar.gz which you download (I love wget!),
gunzip and tar -xvf and then you need to install the
kernel-headers to match whatever kernel you're running (uname -a will
tell you). In my case kernel-headers-2.4.18-bf2.4. You run the make
exactly as the instructions you untarred for e100 said. I don't think
I to move anything to a new destination and all I had to do then was
to modprobe e100 and bingo. Works fine.
Of course, I had to put another ethernet card in to do this but a
simple old card was enough.
I do think there's a severe problem for Debian (and perhaps Linux more
generally now) that we don't have good hardware compatibility lists
or easy sources of downloadable floppy disc images of drivers we might
need to complement the basic Woody CD install. All the new hardware
I've tried to install Debian Woody on recently has posed at least one
problem and they're not all documented on Debian-user or elsewhere and
one is still beating me. At the same time an increasing proportion of
the traffic here seems to be about hardware incompatibilities (sound,
SATA, video/TV are common ones). Is there any chance that something like
the popularity contest package could become an installation option in
Sarge and relay back as much information as the installer (or anything
else) could glean about hardware to some central repository where we
could look up our hardware or hardware we might be thinking of buying.
There might be an option to make yourself contactable either via an
anonymous relayer, or directly, if you opted in to this collection of
information about your hardware.
I for one would opt in and would put in some money (not much but let's
say the price of at least one M$ piece of trouble!) to fund
development since I'm a useless programmer and can't contribute in
other ways!
Best wishes all,
Chris
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