Alexander Bernauer wrote:
On Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 02:52:13PM -0500, cga wrote:Recently installed "etch" and had problems with the installer recognizing/configuring my PC card. Now when I boot into the the new system ifconfig only lists the loopback interface. "cardctl ident/info/status" do not seem to indicate a problem with pcmcia..Unfortunately I can't tell you what your problem is. But I would try the following:"ifconfig -a" does list the eth0 interface and "lsmod" indicates that module 3c574_cs is loaded with a use count of 1. So everything concerning the card looks ok as far as I can tell - down to the led's on the nic and the cable modem - but try as I might I am not able to bring up eth0.At this point, can you configure the device with ifconfig? ifconfig eth0 <someip> up Provide some valid IP of your network. Can you then ping any host of the LAN? cu
Thanks much, Alexander..! I can bring up eth0 w/ ifconfig. But that doesn't help because the IP address is acquired dynamically via dhcp (cable modem & optimum online). And running dhclient manually (or ifup which invokes dhclient) fails miserably.. It broadcasts for about a minute trying to obtain a lease and never finds the dhcp server. Interestingly I have no such problem with a debian stable (sarge) install with the 2.4.27 kernel or with a ubuntu (debian-derived) 5.10 install that uses a 2.6 kernel.. I see the message "starting PC card services" and everything proceeds smoothly after this. So I'm now pretty much convinced that this is a bug in the current "etch" (debian testing) installer - something in the sequence of events where cardmgr/pcmcia and network configuration are concerned: in the initial phase of the install - before booting into the new kernel that gets installed on the HD - I am able to go back to the main install menu and re-run the "configure network" step and eth0 comes up with a valid IP address from my ISP. The trouble is that on subsequent boots I have no way of re-running this magic "configure network" step and everything I have tried manually fails. So I guess I'll have to wait for this bug to be fixed - possibly filing a bug report to speed things up a bit - and temporarily install ubuntu (breezy) so I have an environment with a recent 2.6 kernel - I need this to run some tests with the ati framebuffer driver and small fonts in console raw mode.. stuff that appear not to be supported before 2.6.10.. Maybe I'll also check the debian unstable branch.. may be a better choice for software availability. In any event this boils down to the "etch" installer not recognizing my (and presumably countless other..) PC card nic's while the "sarge" and "breezy" installers have no such problem. The reason I started this thread was just to check whether I might be able to bypass this by manually configuring eth0 because I'd much rather work with debian "testing" than ubuntu or "unstable".. But it looks like that's what I'll have to do unless your or someone else can come up with a workaround. Thank you very much indeed for helping me with this *very* frustrating issue. It's not like I'm running on some exotic hardware or anything.. Let me know where I should look for instructions on how to file a debian installer bug effectively..!! Regards, Chris. PS. you mailed your reply to me directly instead of the debian-laptop list. So I left your entire post untouched for the record..