At home I have a Linux triple boot machine running vanilla
installations of Red Hat 6.1, TurboLinux 4.0, and the new Debian
"Slink-n-1/2" that came with the O'Reilly book.
All was well with the FIC 503+ motherboard which has 1 agp, 3 pci, 3
isa slots, Netgear FX-310 NIC card, and an ISA SB16 sound card running a
AMD K62 400 and 64MB ram. All three distro's boot great, ran fine etc. I
then went and bought a (Linux supported) SAF CDR that is a SCSI, and the
SCSI card is a "Advansys" card which is also supported. Here is where is
gets crazy.
Upon rebooting with the (pci) Advansys SCSI card in (pci) slot-1, and
my NIC card in (pci) slot-2 and (pci) slot-3 open I could easily setup
the Red Hat 6.1 system, and the TurboLinux 4.0 system but the Debian
"Slink-n-1/2" refused to load my eth0, no networking.
The output of "ifconfig" in Debian did in fact show eth0 as up, but is
was non-fuctional and when I went to view /var/log/messages the
following line just kept looping on and on.
<snipped>
kernel: eth0: Changing PNIC configuration to half-duplex, CSR6 01860000.
The last numeric value (#01860000) would continue to change on each new
line, which was occuring every 3 seconds.
[THE SOLUTION AND A QUESTION]
I eventually reinstalled Debian "Slink-n-1/2" thinking that maybe if
Debian saw the SCSI card from the beginning of the install all would be
fine, but that didn't work either.The SCSI card and CDROM was always
detected and identified in Debian's DMESG throughout this whole
experience. The solution was to seperate the SCSI and NIC cards by
leaving a slot open. I put the NIC in (pci) slot-1 and the SCSI in (pci)
slot-3, leaving (pci) slot-2 open.
[QUESTION]
What do you think enabled Red Hat 6.1 and TurboLinux 4.0 to deal with
this and not Debian "Slin-n-1/2" ?
--Bill Schoolcraft, Technical Support Engineer Linuxcare, Inc. 415.354.4878 x343 bschoolcraft@linuxcare.com, http://www.linuxcare.com Linuxcare, "At The Center of LINUX"
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