Re: Networking

Hi group,

I'm still struggling to get some networking going - or, more particularly,
to get a network card detected.
I semi- gave up with the Ether Express cards as I couldn't get either linux
or windows 95 to see them and I have now acquired some other cards which
ought to work but things seem to be going from bad to worse!
The 'new cards' I have (donated to me second-hand, can't you tell funds are
very short at the moment!) are a PCI D-Link DE-530 CT, an IBM EtherJet ISA
and an IBM EtherStreamer ISA. As far as I can tell from the HOWTOs all
should be supported but the computer will not detect any under linux. On the
same machine, all are detected by Windows 95 and I currently have the D-Link
card set up on IRQ11 under windows.
Now it gets more problematic. Since linux would not detect any of the cards
I wondered if I maybe hadn't compiled support into the kernel properly and
so I did an 'xconfig' etc. This showed that I had support for PCI network
cards compiled in and support for Ether Express and several other network
cards as modules. I changed the status of the Ether Express and the other
parts that seemed appropriate to be compiled into a new kernel and carried
on with the 'make dep, make clean etc.' However, when I got to the 'make
zImage' I ran into trouble as, when it finished rattling the disk drive, it
gave me the following error messages:
Root device is (3, 70)
Boot Sector 512 bytes
Setup is 4396 bytes
System is 535Kb
System is too big
make[1]: *** [zImage] ERROR 1
make[1]: Leaving directory 'usr/src/linux-2.0.36/arch/i386/boot'
make: *** [zImage] ERROR 2

I don't understand the 'System is too big' message - too big for what? The
hard drive I am using certainly has enough room on it and KDiskFree reports
/dev/hdb1 size 22.8MB /boot 20.5MB free
/dev/hdb6 size 3.75GB / 2.29GB free

Can anyone tell me what's going wrong and explain in simple 'Janet and John'
language what I need to do please? I assume that the first step is to get
the system to detect the card at boot up and then set up the network - is
this correct? Please don't presume I know anything though, I am still very
much a beginner with linux and statements like 'give the config program this
info' as in Jon's earlier reply below or 'include........in the script' mean
very little to me - as far as I can see, there are only so many choices in
the config program and the ones I can see probably seem inappropriate and as
for 'startup scripts', what are they?

Sorry to be a nuisance but any help will be very gratefully received as,
since my daughter got her own house and made off with her comuter equipment,
I am getting a bit fed up having to carry my laser printer up two floors to
use it on the linux box when I need to!!

Thanks,

Ian

> This is the one bit of info you need. This seems to be the original, old

Ether

> Express, and those 1994 date codes (9438, 9432) support that. The HowTo
> says Status - Supported. So, if you give the config program this info, it

should

> find it. I'm not sure how you set the I/O, int vector, etc. I seem to

remember that

> the early ones had a configuration program that ran under DOS, and you

supplied

> the address parameters, etc. and it programmed a non-volatile memory on

the

> card. You might look around on Intel's web site for this program.
>
> Jon