OK, I'm probably some kind of idiot (networking)

[william]

I'm working on a TP570 for a co-worker. It supposedly had a couple dozen virii and almost a thousand(!) pieces of spyware, but when I got it the HD was empty. I bought an ultrabase from eBay and installed Ubuntu. Great install, looks good, works, but...

No ethernet. I've got two PCMCIA network cards, one Netgear FA411 and one 3Com EtherLink III. Neither of them works. The system sees them, but won't configure them.

I've tried it now with Ubuntu, SuSE and Gentoo, and I'm going to go ahead and try Lycoris, Mutagenix, Mandrake and fnord (those are the distros I've got downloaded). However, I strongly suspect that it's a hardware issue, rather than software.

One promising thing I found in my searches online is something called whereami. It sounds like just the thing I need, but the only installation directions I can find are "sudo apt-get install whereami", which appears to want a network connection to work. If my network connection worked, I wouldn't need whereami. I tried copying the whereami package to a USB thumb drive, and then to a folder on the desktop, but I can't seem to install it from either of those locations.

So: will this let whichever distro I end up with use the PCMCIA ethernet card(s)? and how, exactly, do I get it to install? I've got a vague idea that I can edit the apt-get conf file to add a desktop folder to the list of places to search, but I'm entirely unsure about how to do that.

If wereami isn't the way to go, what is?

[Bob Collins]

I'll take a shot here.

It does not totally sound like a networking issue, but more hardware, as you say, because the system does see either card but won't let you configure it?

I assume you have tried using ifconfig as root, no?

I think with Linux that you will end up with the cards being eth0 or maybe eth1. Do either of these show up if you 'dmesg | grep eth' ? Totally off the wall here, but are the PC slots enabled in the BIOS? I am not even sure if they can be disabled that way, but just asking to be sure.

I have an older PCMCIA wireless card that is relatively unknown and it works great under FreeBSD and Mepis Linux. I tested the Mepis Linux due to it's live cd which can, once booted, install to your HD if you like it. I would suggest getting the Mepis live cd and test drive that.

Mepis is a Debian based Linux just made easier. Try that for grins.

Oh yeah, the cards you tried are supported under those dostros, no?

Good luck, let us know what happens next.

[william]

dmesg|grep eth gives me this repeatedly:
eth0: NE2000 Compatible: io 0x300, irq3, hw_addr 00:40:F4:2A:57:91
NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0: transmit timed out

/sbin/ifconfig gives me this:
eth0
Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:40:F4:2A:57
inet6 addr: fe80::240:f4ff:fe2a:5791/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:14 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:1404 (1.3 KiB)
Interrupt: 3 Base address 0x300

lo
Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:6823 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX pacekts:6823 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:619976 (605.4 KiB) TX bytes:619976 (605.4 KiB)

I actually understand a (very) little of this, like the MAC address, packets, collisions and such. It looks to me like it's not even trying to send anything, but the 14 errors intrigue me. Is there a log for this that I could read?

As for whereami, I downloaded it (the debian version, because IIRC, Ubuntu is derived from Debian), put it on a usb thumb drive & copied it to the desktop. I opened it with Archive Manager and ended up with etc, usr & var folders on the desktop. I then went through and manually copied all the files/folders into the /etc, /usr & /var folders. I'm sure if I actually knew what I was doing, they'd have been automatically placed in the right folders.

I then made the suggested changes to /etc/whereami/detect.conf & /etc/whereami/whereami.conf, but it's still not working. I'm pretty sure I need to go back in and make more changes, probably to those two files, but I'm done for the night. It'd also help if I really knew what I was doing, and not just rote copying.

Updates to follow. Next will probably be "how do I get the modem to work?" According to the Device Manager, it's a Lucent winmodem, so I'll have to look that up. Speaking of Device Manager, shouldn't I be seeing the ethernet card in it somewhere? Would that be in one of the System Slot entries under BIOS? After all, it does have this line in Advanced: bios.type string 32-bit PC Card (PCMCIA).

[Bob Collins]

Offhand the eth0 problem might be a duplex or auto negotiate issue. I did a little googling and found that perhaps you can add "full_duplex=1" to where your driver loads for the nic. Or check your switch to see if it is set to not use full duplex or auto negotiate. There prolly is a log file, but I am not a Linux guy, so I have no idea where or how it lives or is made, etc. Try 'man ifconfig' and see if you get any info there.

It also does not look like you have any IPv4 addresses applied to your NICs. I see IPv6 address but nothing else.

Whereami looks interesting, but not sure if it is necessary. I have never used it, so I cannot make any suggestions for help on this item, sorry.

How about trying this from a command line:
'ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.2'
assuming you use a 192.168.1.0 network, this may get something to happen.