Re: [gentoo-user] Networking problems on new install?

[Mick]

On Sunday 06 April 2008, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote:
> On Sonntag, 6. April 2008, Les Henderson wrote:
> > I recently bought a laptop that has an onboard Realtek RTL8101E NIC. I
> > installed a system to dual boot with Windows Vista (which was
> > preinstalled, which I'd really like to be able to get away from
> > eventually) using the amd64 2007.0 liveDVD to do a networkless
> > install. The LiveDVD would load the r8169 module, but networking still
> > would not work (dhcpcd eth0 times out). I used the LiveDVD to emerge
> > the 2.6.19-r5 kernel. I installed the r8101 module from the RealTek
> > site, and while this finally would allow me to see eth0 under my own
> > environment (I could see it booting from the LiveDVD as well),
> > networking still would not work (dhcpcd eth0 times out). Looking
> > around the gentoo forums I've seen suggestions to use either the r8169
> > or r8101 modules (depending on which post I read) using a kernel
> >
> > >2.6.19 and <2.6.22, that finally the module may work. I don't have a
> >
> > spare gentoo box on which I can grab this using emerge. Any
> > suggestions on how I can do this? My windows system has network
> > access, and I can mount my windows partition. Is there a better way to
> > get this NIC working?
>
> install a recent kernel like 2.6.23 or 2.6.24 (just download the sources,
> unpack them in /usr/src, create the linux symlink). And use the in kernel
> r8169 drivers.
>
> Don't use 'vendor' drivers if you don't have to!
>
> > Actually my ultimate goal is to get my Marvell TOPDOG wireless NIC
> > working, but it appears to me that I will need to get ndiswrapper and
> > perhaps wine for this to happen, neither of which are on the LiveDVD.
> > I'm hoping to get a network connection so I can get enough packages to
> > update the system enough to get this working and solve other hardware
> > issues resulting from me having a new laptop designed to work with
> > Vista.
>
> you might want to use the 2008-beta livecd for this - this way you don't
> have with a lot of very messy stuff (like expat). And wine is.. evil. Every
> release breaks something. If your stuff works at all.

Another thing to consider if your card is seen by ifconfig (i.e. you probably 
have found the right driver for the card) but dhcpcd still times out:  you 
may need to recompile the dhcpcd client with the vram USE flag.  Some dhcp 
server implementations won't play nicely without it.
-- 
Regards,
Mick