Re: Asus P5E-VM DO Motherboard Network Driver Availiable? Hardware compatibility with Debian?
On Saturday 14 June 2008 17:13, Odisseas-Nearxos Pasipoularidis wrote:
> Greetings
>
> I own a PC with an Asus P5E-VM DO Motherboard and I am trying to install
> Debian OS on it.
>
> I can't find the driver to configure the Ethernet Network port. I need it
> so I can continue the OS installation over the Internet and be able to use
> Internet later on.
I'm assuming you're installing "etch", or the current "stable"?
There are a few options.
Firstly, consider installing "lenny" aka "testing".
Secondly, consider slapping a cheap third-party ethernet
card in there for which the kernel has drivers.
If you have some requirement to use "etch" and the stock device
(This happens to me from time to time -- corporate policy forbids
"testing", and the device is a rackmount box with no room for
extra cards...), you're not dead, there are still options:
Check the CD that came with the board, if you have it, it may
have drivers on it. You may have to compile the driver, if they
only provide source code.
ASUS claims to have downloadable Linux drivers for this board. Start
from:
<http://support.asus.com/download/download.aspx?SLanguage=en-us>, and
use the widget on the left of that page to select the board model
in the top text field and "Drivers" in the bottom one, and then go.
The Linux drivers are near the bottom of the list of downloadable
items.
If that fails, ASUS's specificaton page
<http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?modelmenu=2&model=1849&l1=3&l2=11&l3=571&l4=0>
says that the LAN adapter is an "Intel 82566DM PCIe Gigabit LAN controller",
so drivers may be available from Intel.
Of course, you can't download anything onto this machine itself, because
it's network device doesn't work. There are two ways around this
chicken-and-egg problem that I'm aware of:
(1) Download all the module-development packages directly from Debian,
and manually install them on the system. You need gcc and its
dependencies, and the header package matching the installation
kernel and its dependencies. With the current net-install CD, this is
linux-headers-2.6.18-5-<arch>, where <arch> is 686 or amd64.
(2) Build the module on a different machine with the same architecture,
and install it manually. Remember to run "depmod" and rebuild
the initramfs when you install the module.
I usually do (2), although I also have a USB stick with all the stuff
for (1) on it.
It looks a bit complicated when it's all written down like that, but
it's actually not so bad. Probably "lenny" or a 3rd-party network card
are your answer anyways.
-- A.
--
Andrew Reid / reidac@bellatlantic.net
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