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Bug#344375: linux-image-2.6-686: sk98lin



Package: linux-image-2.6-686
Severity: wishlist

This is a feature request to have a more recent sk98lin driver in the stock
debian kernel. I am the owner of a Toshiba Tecra S2, which contains a

0000:02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8053 Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 15)

When I installed debian I actually had to dig up a PCMCIA card in order to
netinstall debian  (see 
http://www.de-brauwer.be/wiki/wikka.php?wakka=LinuxTecraS2 for my notes
on this system). The main issue is that the onboard ethernet card is not
support out of the box because the sk98lin driver embedded in vanilla is
_OLD_. I just gave linux-image-2.6.14-2-686 a try, and it also sustained this
error. So I'm adding this as a wishlist item because for now I have to 
compile my kernels myself simply because of this module version. A quick
look at google: http://www.google.be/search?q=debian+sk98lin shows I'm not 
the only person with issues:

Following are references to laptops/persons with issues with this driver
(only debian users, so the brave few that succeeded, can you imagine how
many brave souls did not succeed at this task ? I regularly get e-mails from
people that read the page on my wiki and encounterd problems with the 
installation):
http://www.progsoc.uts.edu.au/~rheise/LW60/ : LG's LW60-DBJA Express Notebook
http://www.hermann-uwe.de/hardware/debian-gnu-linux-on-a-toshiba-satellite-a80-117: Toshiba Satellite A80-117
http://tuxmobil.de/toshiba_tecra_a4_linux.html : Toshiba TECRA A4 
http://www.to.infn.it/~ipesando/Installation.html
http://irbs.sourceforge.net/toshiba-a80-laptop-debian-howto-en.html: Toshiba A80
http://www.is.tu-braunschweig.de/~buethe/p4p800_raid.html : Asus P4P800
http://www.land-of-kain.de/linux/toshiba_a80-117.html -> Mind the sentence 
"The result: After 10 evenings of testing, I am done with it. I will return 
the Notebook to my local dealer (Mediamarkt)."

and

" Update: I had an email conversation in 2005-07 with a guy named Thomas 
Meyer, who bought a successor of the notebook, the Toshiba Satellite A80-154, 
and succeeded installing a Gentoo on it. It turns out that if you compile your
own kernel with updated netcard and wlan drivers, Linux works at least on his 
hardware. He also wrote an install article."

And after those links I got tired of googling...is there a specific reason
why this driver isn't embedded in debian (yet), am I missing something ? Or 
are you trying to give people installing debian a challenge ;-). Other 
distributions e.g. SuSe (but that is no reference) support the driver out of
the box...




-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.14
Locale: LANG=en_US, LC_CTYPE=en_US (charmap=ISO-8859-1)



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