RealTek RTL8139 Linux driver for Debian install?

[Gerald Combs]

Jonathan Hutchins wrote:
> 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.

According to

    http://usa.asus.com/prog/spec.asp?m=A7N8X-X&langs=09

it's a combination nVidia / RealTek device.  After checking around, it
appears that you need nVidia's nForce driver:

    http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_nforce_1.0-0261

The RealTek portion (8201BL) appears to be a transceiver only, which
means there's no driver.

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

This was almost the case for me.  My MB (Asus as well) has an onboard
Broadcom NIC.  At the time I bought it, I had to go searching for a
third-party driver.  Luckily it's been rolled into more recent kernel
releases.