Newbie Linux help

[Hottie]

Have been trying to install linux in my P4 3.6ghz, Asus P5GD2 system the last 8days. I have try red hat and mandrake, no luck. Finally get ubuntu to work but it don't recognize the gig lan so I put the asus drive disk in because it have Linux drive in it. But after 24hrs I still havn't figure out HOW to install the driver...

Anyone kind enough to tell my how?

 

[n0cmonkey]

Read the directions. Follow them.

EDIT:Ew, if it's that Marvell chipset things might be bad.

 

[RampantAndroid]

What versions of red hat and mandrake?

Red hat is gone...unless its RH enterprise. It is now fedora core 4.

Mandrake is up to 10.2, also known as Mandriva Linux 2005 LE.

Finally, try out Suse, thats another major one.

Check out linux forums....I think one is forums.fedora.com or something.

 

[Hottie]

Yes it is Marvell chipset and I am piss.

RH is fedora core 3(slow as hell because it keep trying to talk to the lan)
Mandrake is 2005 LE(would install because it can find the CD rom during installation)

 

[drag]

Not sure why Linux doesn't support that ethernet right out of the box at this moment. Maybe they are new or something.

The PCI version should be supported by kernel 2.6.13 (which is the next kernel), but I don't know anything about the PCI-e version, which is what I beleive you have.

There are drivers for it aviable..
http://www.syskonnect.de/syskonnect/support/driver/htm/sk9elin.htm

But you'd have to probably compile them yourself, which means that you have to have the headers for your paticular kernel installed and know what to do with the ./configure ; make ; make install type things.. which as a newbie isn't going to be easy.

But all that's what I've seen from a quick google around.

At the moment probably the easiest thing to do would be to just disable the onboard stuff and buy a cheap PCI ethernet card.

Just do a search for them in newegg with "linux" keyword or whatever you like to do. A cheap Zonet card is like 5 bucks, but a gigabit card is around eleven. Then you can get everything installed and such and worry about the marvell stuff when you feel like learning a bit on how to compile stuff.

A extra nic card is nice and handy to have around anyways, especially if you want to turn a old computer into a router/firewall or whatnot.

 

[lucky9]

drag is right. it's much easier at where you're at to get a cheap network card.
you might try Simply Mepis 3.3.1-1 and see if it's easier to get up. but the network card is much easier to install than getting a raw driver to work.

 

[Carl Uman]

If you are looking for distros to try check out Gentoo (big user forum as well). Not real easy to install but you will have a better understanding when you are done (note that I did say much better not complete).

 

[n0cmonkey]

Oh, it's syskonnect? That shouldn;t be too bad then. From what I've read, they're the best gigabit cards out there, on OpenBSD anyhow.

 

[sourceninja]

I was just recompiling a kernel for my dev machine and I noticed that their are drivers for marvell gigabyte nics in the kernel, but they are marked depreciated. I'd suspect they would work if they were compiled as a module. I have an onboard marvel and an on board nvida lan. I just only use the nvidia one with forcedeth drivers. I'll try recompiling this machine tonight and see if those drivers work or not.

 

[rmrf]

the marvell nic on my nf4 board was detected at install with ubuntu and ubuntu64.

 

[drag]

There definately are drivers aviable... the company that makes the cards, or at least a company that sells the cards GPL'd them themselves.

The trouble is that they are very new...

The drivers for the PCI-based marvel cards are supported by the kernel proper, but the deal is that he isn't using a onboard PCI gigabit nic card... he is using a PCI-Express gigabyte nic card, which is a different marvel card that requires different drivers.

They are refered sometimes as the 'Yukon' and then the Yukon-II or Yukon 2 or whatever is the PCI-e card.

The drivers are aviable for them from the site I linked to earlier.

The trouble with those is that it's a bit of a programming kludge.. they shoehorned 2 drivers (the PCI versions and the PCI-e version) into one big thing.

The are undergoing a small rewrite to seperate the code and get support into the kernel proper. Once that is done then they will be supported by default on everything.

I suggest getting a cheap nic card for now because he is a newbie and downloading and compiling a driver may not be the easiest thing to do right now. Once he gets it all sorted out then he'll be able to do compile the drivers himself, although by that time it may be easier to get support by doing a kernel update.

Part of the code base has been added to 2.6.12 kernels for support of the Yukon series cards.. That's the skge driver.. Eventually the Yukon-II cards will be supported to, maybe with the 2.6.13 or 2.6.14 if we are lucky.

Since it's a PCI-e it should be VERY nice. I wish I had one.

 

[sourceninja]

Good to know. Just to reply for my previous post. That kernel driver worked great for my onboard nic. Hopefully, the driver he needs gets worked out soon

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: drag
There definately are drivers aviable... the company that makes the cards, or at least a company that sells the cards GPL'd them themselves.

The trouble is that they are very new...

The drivers for the PCI-based marvel cards are supported by the kernel proper, but the deal is that he isn't using a onboard PCI gigabit nic card... he is using a PCI-Express gigabyte nic card, which is a different marvel card that requires different drivers.

They are refered sometimes as the 'Yukon' and then the Yukon-II or Yukon 2 or whatever is the PCI-e card.

The drivers are aviable for them from the site I linked to earlier.

The trouble with those is that it's a bit of a programming kludge.. they shoehorned 2 drivers (the PCI versions and the PCI-e version) into one big thing.

The are undergoing a small rewrite to seperate the code and get support into the kernel proper. Once that is done then they will be supported by default on everything.

I suggest getting a cheap nic card for now because he is a newbie and downloading and compiling a driver may not be the easiest thing to do right now. Once he gets it all sorted out then he'll be able to do compile the drivers himself, although by that time it may be easier to get support by doing a kernel update.

Part of the code base has been added to 2.6.12 kernels for support of the Yukon series cards.. That's the skge driver.. Eventually the Yukon-II cards will be supported to, maybe with the 2.6.13 or 2.6.14 if we are lucky.

Since it's a PCI-e it should be VERY nice. I wish I had one.

It's a kludge to support pci and pci-e with the same driver?

 

[crimson117]

Depends how it's done... if there's just one driver, it has to have lots of IF/THEN's that say "if PCI, do it this way, if PCI-E, do it that way". The ideal would be to make separate drivers, so the drivers can be as simple as possible.

Besides, the PCI and the PCI-E cards are very different, so why not have two drivers? AGP and PCI-E cards are identified differently by nVidia drivers, they just bundle all their various drivers together in one download.