Etch/Sid netinstall problem

[sammil]

I must be doing something wrong. I have Ubuntu 6.06 up and running on my new box with the onboard Marvell Yukon GB LAN. Detected and used on boot. But Etch uses a Debian 2.6.15 kernel which only seems to have the sk98lin driver. And the netinstall uses that one. I tried Sid netinstall which uses 2.6.16, and it found the chip. But it installs a 2.6.15 kernel...

Plus I use pppoeconf for my DSL. So Sid finds the chip but I can't get the network going as pppoe isn't running. And then when I reboot into the new system and install pppoe, the kernel is too old and doesn't have the sky2 driver.

Catch 22? Using the latest daily build of Sid netinstall. Is there some way to grab the latest kernel plus the build components to rebuild the kernel and then download X and so on? My level is barely above newish...

[danieldk]

You can download an up to date driver from:
http://www.skd.de/e_en/support/driver.html?navid=14

These drivers can usually be compiled on every 2.6 kernel. You may have to find out which chip the NIC uses. 'lspci' can help out here.

[sammil]

Daniel,

Thanks for the info. I downloaded the driver that someone on a Debian forum suggested. I had previously downloaded all 17 isos and spent the better part of an evening installing kernel sources and compiler thingies. Plus correcting a bunch of problems from the faulty installer... no shadow passwords, no root password, user disappeared, no desktop. Plus I had to manually enter all the CDs from the command line into sources.list. When I thought I had everything in place I ran the LAN installer. At least this time it found headers and source and tried compiling a kernel. But it bombed on the last stage for some reason. I'm guessing I missed manually installing a program for modules.

Right now I'm inclined to stay with Ubuntu and CentOS until Debian provides a kernel with the open source driver sky2. Pity, because I really prefer Debian.

Thanks again.

Sam

[danieldk]

Maybe you could post the output of the compilation error?

Of course, I won't motivate people to ditch CentOS :).