[Rank Newbie] Netgear ether card under Corel distrib
I am diving head first into Linux, but have done very little work with Unix
in my career except a tiny but at University.
My immediate problem is that I can't get network cards working under my
Corel linux (or my sound card -- an inland Sound Card PCI 128 Wave Table --
but I'm prepared to leave that one for later).
I have bought two cards now. Both have had me download .c versions of the
tulip drivers, and neither of them would compile for my Debian variant O/S.
I have tried reinstalling the OS from scratch after installing each set of
cards, but it didn't help. I can see the cards in the control Center's ftp
setup, and I can set options for it, but when I do ifconfig -a, all I get is
the loopback. Plus, the control center sees only card and there are two.
If you feel like commenting, the first thing I want this thing to do is run
NAT, so if that is relevant to this discussion, please say so.
I have a home-built ABP Dual-celeron 400 (couldn't get 366's any more)
machine, with a downloaded Corel Linux distrib.
So my immediate question is:
I need to know what to do with the tulip.c file I got from Bay Networks for
my Netgear FA 310TX cards (I have two, so I can run this thing as a NAT
machine).
The metaquestion, which might be more useful to me in the long run, is:
How do I translate instructions about compiling for RedHat or Slackware into
instructions for Debian? Specific questions, which might or might not be the
right ones:
- do I compile for a module or a monolithic kernel?
- after hours spent reading the /usr/doc stuff, I tried to compile, but I
found that one of the make files referred to a bunch of files that didn't
actually exist (at least, not in the locations given in the file; and the
first few I searched for didn't exist *at all* -- I know, I searched).
I found a bug report on this one (#32456 --
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/debian/Bugs/db/32/32456-b.html), but I can
find nowhere to search for responses to these bug reports.
The metametaquestion is where is the best place to find answers to these
sorts of questions for myself. I spent most of yesterday trying to work this
one out for myself. I visited a couple of hundred web pages, and read a
significant proportion of the /usr/doc stuff, but I am no wiser about why
the arrangement of the files in Debian is clearly very different to those in
Redhat, what that means for compiling for Debian, etc. And I have a cable
modem. This time was almost entirely spent reading stuff that didn't answer
my questions.
I like the philosophy of Debian, but if everything I get is going to be set
up for Redhat, and if adapting them to Debian is going to be hard, I might
have to give up on debian and go with Red Hat. I'd rather not, though!
TIA
Help!!!
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