RealTek RTL8139 Linux driver for Debian install?

[Jonathan Hutchins]

On Saturday, January 10, 2004 07:07 pm, Leo J Mauler wrote:

> Anyway, lsmod shows that neither "8139too" nor "rtl8139" is loaded in
> memory.   Arg.
 
I have an Asus A7N8X-X board that has a Realtek based NIC on-board.  Some of 
the documentation has pointed me to the 8139 drivers, and aparantly there are 
two or three different branches on this driver, accompanied by the usual 
sniping at the practices of the different development teams.

You may have better luck with this driver:  http://www.scyld.com/network/
rtl8139.html

On further investigation, I found that my MB actually only has the Realtek 
8002 (I think) chipset, which is driven by the MAC code in the NVidia chipset 
on the motherboard.  _That_ uses - or is supposed to use, the 3Com 3c90x 
driver, which I downloaded and compiled from 3Com.  For some reason, it isn't 
being included in various linux distributions - I think it's a "tainted" 
module with code that's not GNU licensed.

 I tried the version that was on the Asus CD, which turns out to be the same 
version I downloaded from the 3Com website.  Because of changes between the 
2.2 and 2.4 kernel source trees you have to do some contusions to your source 
tree in order to compile it.

None of these will reliably detect the NIC, although I thought I did get it to 
load and detect one time - saw something that said "asus" as it scrolled 
past.  I haven't been able to get it to load again.  So I too have an 
on-board NIC that won't work.

I'm using an actual 3Com 3c905 PCI card instead, and the reasons I guess they 
don't bother with the ec90x driver is that this card works fine with the 
3c59x driver.  (Which also doesn't detect the on-board NIC.)

If anybody figures all this out, please share it.  There appear to be several 
of us stranded with these unusable on-board NICs.