Re: network card problem
Hello Ahmed.
Please ignore the post by Luipher Fhang. This is not even his real name
(for example he is also using the name "Bruno Brandris" these days), he
is just a so called "troll" trying to provoke people. He is not to be
taken serious, but should just be ignored:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(Internet)
Experienced participants in online forums know that the most
effective way to discourage a troll is usually to ignore him or
her, because responding tends to encourage trolls to continue
disruptive posts — hence the often-seen warning: "Please do not
feed the trolls".
So back to your actual question:
It's not Debian choosing to support or not to support particular
hardware. When it comes to drivers, Debian pretty much relies on driver
support by the Linux kernel, and the Linux kernel developers rely on
hardware manufacturers to contribute chip set specifications and device
IDs for their devices. So up to a certain degree, Debian is just a
"reseller of software", except we're not 'selling' but just 'packaging',
and there is a share of custom development involved.
The network card you are using should be working with the "tg3" driver,
which supports many recent Broadcom based network devices.
However the kernel you have might just not know that this driver is
appropriate for your device when e.g. HP chose to use a different PCI
device ID than other vendors. There might be a way to force a driver to
recognize a particular PCI device ID (I've never done that, so I can't
give you any details), or using a newer kernel (where the device IDs
have been added to the driver by someone else) might help.
With such a bug report, you should include information such as the
"lspci -nn" output for the affected device. On my laptop this contains:
02:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401-B0
100Base-TX [14e4:170c] (rev 02)
The hex-ID at the end [14e4:170c] is the raw device ID (in my case for
the 100mbit network device in my laptop), which is used by the drivers
to identify whether they can support this device. Having this ID ready
is very helpful when finding appropriate drivers for the device.
Your device will probably have the ID 14e4:165a, judging by
http://pci-ids.ucw.cz/iii//?i=14e4165a
The first steps you should do is to find out what PCI device ID your
network card has, and which kernel version you are using (via "uname
-a") and use this information to get installation support. Make sure you
are using a 2.6 kernel version and did not install with a 2.4 kernel.
Please direct your questions to the debian-user@lists.debian.org mailing
list; your question is more of a technical nature, not of a political
nature as appropriate for the -project mailing list. Thus the other list
is more appropriate.
Best Regards,
Erich Schubert
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