Member Avatar for wired_duck

hiya i mucked with virtual pc 2004...tried out my redhat8,i was able to go online and yak it up with yahoo messenger for linux.
thus i was definitely encouraged to go and load it on a seprate
drive
well.it wont work,the card that is..
it wont initialize.and i am seriously confused.
worse still,(does it get beter?)
i was instructed with the ifconfig,yadda dhclient yada
no luck(even the modprobe )
so i placed my ip ,subnet mask and even the other stuff that windows xp showed for my ip
well
it initialized
and if i hadnt fallen asleep i think i may have reached yahoo
in other words it did not go there
key things
one
i have cable ,two it worked in virtpc
any ideas guys and gals?
i need help
becuase i even tried rolling back to a red hat 7.1 i had only that time it didnt work out
can you help?
and jst ask me the questions i will get the answers
one other thing
when i modprobe whatever..the 8139too ,as it was booting up it would freeze the activation saying it was the wrong driver.
any help is needed
thanks

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Dani AI

Generated

Short diagnostic summary and practical next steps to get a Realtek card working on an old Red Hat 8 install.

The symptom set (works in a VM, fails on real hardware; manual addressing briefly brought the interface up; driver probe during boot reports a wrong-driver/freeze) most often points to one of three areas: hardware/BIOS/PCI resource issues, a driver/kernel mismatch, or a corrupt/incorrect driver binary. already tried several sensible things; and are right to push toward identifying the exact card and driver match.

Collect these logs and identifiers first (they show exactly what the kernel and driver are doing):

dmesg | tail -n 50
cat /var/log/messages | tail -n 100
uname -r
cat /proc/interrupts

The kernel messages will show driver probe failures and error strings; the interrupt table shows whether the NIC got an IRQ or conflicted with another device; the kernel version is needed to pick a compatible driver.

Practical fixes to try, in order:

  • Check the physical basics: link light, cable, try a different PCI slot or another machine to rule out hardware failure.
  • Boot a neutral LiveCD (newer kernel) to see if a more recent driver recognizes the card — that separates driver vs. hardware problems.
  • If a vendor driver must be compiled, match the running kernel exactly (matching kernel-devel/kernel-source and development toolchain) before building; otherwise builds will fail or load the wrong object.
  • If the driver probe halts the init process, try boot kernel options that affect PCI/MSI (for old kernels: pci=nomsi or noapic) — some Realtek chips and older kernels interact badly with MSI/APIC.
  • If everything else fails, try the vendor driver from Realtek or a newer kernel tree; on very old distributions a newer distro/Live image is often the quickest path.

For focused help, the most useful artifacts are the exact PCI vendor:device ID, the last 30 lines of dmesg showing the probe sequence, and the output of uname -r. Tie those back to and so the correct driver/version can be recommended.

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Member Avatar for knute

So what specific realtek nic do you have anyway?

Is there a source driver on the installation disk? One nic that I bought had a linux directory that had the source that I compiled myself. Though for that you do need to have either the kernel source and/or the headers installed.

Member Avatar for DMR

As knute said, we need to know the exact model of the Realtek card; there are a few out there, and they don't all use the 8139too module. A good start would be to open a terminal window and issue the following command (case-sensitive, and the first letter is a lower-case "L"):

lspci -vv |grep Eth

Post the results, and we can take it from there.

If you want, take a look through They apply only to static addressing, so if you're supposed to be using DHCP, let us know.

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