On Dec 14, 2006, at 5:05 PM, Michael Biebl wrote:
Debian Bug Tracking System wrote:Processing commands for control@bugs.debian.org:Bug#403112: NetworkManager: Workaround for "OldWorld beige G3 Macintosh bmac network interface disabled on reboot"reassign 403112 network-managerWarning: Unknown package 'networkmanager' Bug reassigned from package `networkmanager' to `network-manager'.So what exactly is the problem now, regarding network-manager? If your driver is broken, the driver should be fixed. If you setup a static configuration in /etc/network/interfaces, network-manager will not touch your network settings (as it can't deal with static configurations yet. NM 0.7.x is supposed to bring support for that). Could you elaborate a bit more?
I don't think it's the driver that's broken. I believe the chip is incapable of a feature that NetworkManager wants.
The OldWorld PowerMac (a "Beige G3") machine (that I use for test installing Debian Etch) has a "bmac" 10-baseT ethernet controller on the motherboard, of a type that is apparently fairly common on OldWorld PowerMac machines, of which Apple made many varieties over the years.
Apparently, the bmac is not able to do some of the fancy tricks that more modern network interface chips are capable of, such as telling the software whether it is seeing a carrier or not. This leads the NetworkManager to declare:
Dec 11 02:34:47 debian NetworkManager: <information>^Ieth1: Driver 'bmac' does not support carrier detection. ^IYou must switch to it manually. Dec 11 02:34:47 debian NetworkManager: <information>^Inm_device_init (): waiting for device's worker thread to start Dec 11 02:34:47 debian NetworkManager: <information>^Inm_device_init (): device's worker thread started, continuing. Dec 11 02:34:47 debian NetworkManager: <information>^INow managing wired Ethernet (802.3) device 'eth1'. Dec 11 02:34:47 debian NetworkManager: <information>^IDeactivating device eth1.
Ooops! This leaves the machine with no way to talk to the network even though I used that very same interface extensively and successfully when I installed the OS just a few minutes before.
A work-around is to declare the bmac interface to be active and static, which makes NetworkManager leave it alone. However, if I read your comments correctly, as of NM 0.7.x, even that may not be enough.
There are lots more details (many of them probably irrelevant) in the referenced bug report at http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi? bug=402547 which I submitted against the debian-installer before I realized where the real problem lies.
Does this help? Thanks! Rick