Problems detecting network card

[Andreas Tille <tille@physik.uni-halle.de>]

Hello,

(sorry for posting this to -devel, but I'm not subscribed to -user
 because I can't cope with the lot of mails ... )

I maintain a 486 box.  The network card (low cost ne2000) worked with
previous installations.  For several reasons I tried to start a
complete new Slink installation from scratch.  The box has an old
Mitsumi FX cdrom drive with its own adapter (no ide).  After installing
a sound card I wasn't able to use this cdrom under DOS with DMA
as several checks showed.  The soundcard occupy all DMA channels
so that there is no one left for the cdrom.  The box can not boot
from CDROM, but I left a very small (15MB) partition which could
start Debian.  Network connections could be done before (!!) the
soundcard was installed.  So far to the hardware.

Could anyone give me some hints how to cope with the following
problems:

1) After installing the soundcard (which should not be used under Linux
   but only for DOS) the kernel prints the following messages:

SIOADDRT: Invalid argument
SIOCSIFADDR: Operation not supported by device
eth0: unknown interface
SIOCSIFNETMASK: Operation not supported by device
SIOCSIFBRDADDR: Operation not supported by device
eth0: unknown interface
SIOCADDRT: Invalid argument

   I tried it with Kernel 2.0.34 (which worked before) and Kernel
   2.2.4.  In both kernels the network adapter ne2000 (isa) was
   compiled (hard not as module).

   By the way I NEVER managed to install any network adapter in the
   installation process via loading the appropriate module.  This is
   true for more than 5 different boxes I installed Debian on.  In any
   case I had to recompile the kernel to make the network work.

2) Is it possible to get the cdrom working under the circumstances
   described above.  May be I could get rid of the sound card with
   its nasty plug-and-play features which consumes DMA channels which
   the cdrom is neading.

Kind regards

      Andreas.