I am new to Gentoo linux. I currently use SuSE 10 but am thinking about switching to Gentoo. I downloaded install-x86-minimal-2006.1.iso, burned the CD and booted with it. I used boot option ide=nodma because Gentoo was unable to mount my CDROM drive initially. Now I am on Chapter 3 of the Gentoo Handbook and have not been successful with getting my networking to work. My ethernet card is the following (from lspci -v): 00:02.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82557/8/9 [Ethernet Pro 100] (rev 05) Subsystem: Intel Corporation 82558 10/100 with Wake on LAN Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 16 Memory at f5fff000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=4K] I/O ports at 7c60 [size=32] Memory at f7600000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1M] Capabilities: [dc] Power Management version 1 I believe the network module needed is e100 and I see that it is loaded when I do lsmod (showing first 10 lines of output): Module Size Used by nls_iso8859_1 3968 1 nls_cp437 5504 1 floppy 40644 0 e100 21380 0 mii 3584 1 e100 aic7xxx 128436 0 scsi_transport_spi 12544 1 aic7xxx rtc 6836 0 nfs 70412 0 When I do ifconfig, I get: eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:60:94:EB:83:02 UP BROADCAST NOTRAILERS RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b) lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 RX packets:8 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:8 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:520 (520.0 b) TX bytes:520 (520.0 b) I've tried several things from the handbook such as net-setup and manually editing /etc/conf.d/net but no luck. When this machine was running Windows and SuSE linux, it had no problem acquiring an IP address from my router's dhcp service. I also have a laptop attached to the router and is getting an IP address fine. Without a network connection, I'm not able to move forward with Gentoo's installation. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you in advance.
Configure your IP manually (you can even use net-setup for it).
So I will not be able to use dhcp? As you suggested I used net-setup to configure a static IP address for eth0. Now when I do ifconfig I do get a static IP address (192.168.1.10). When I try to ping my router 192.168.1.254 I get "connect: Network is unreachable". It seems my network is still not working. What next?
Try to do 'killall dhcpcd; dhcpcd eth0'. Does it get an IP address? What does 'mii-tool eth0' show?
'killall dhcpcd; dhcpcd eth0' produced: dhcpcd: no process killed Error, timed out waiting for a valid DHCP server response It did not get an IP address. 'mii-tool eth0' produced: eth0: negotiated 100baseTx-FD flow-control, link ok
Today I downloaded Knoppix 5.0.1 and burned it onto CD. I then booted the same machine with the Knoppix CD. I am now receiving an IP address fine from my router. Does this help determine what the problem may be with my gentoo CD? Does the gentoo CD contain a bad network driver? How can I tell? Please help.
The Knoppix CD doesn't help anything. It could be any number of things on the Gentoo CD. It could be the DHCP version, it could be the kernel module. There's really not a whole lot that can be done from our end, until another CD is made to have you test to ensure it is no longer present. For the time being, you can try a 2006.0 or 2005.1 CD.
:( Not the answer I wanted to hear. I guess gentoo isn't for me right now. I'll move on to a different distro. You're welcomed to close this bug. Thanks for all of your help!
Well, a problem with the CD doesn't equal a problem with the distribution, since the distribution isn't installed directly from CD media, like it is with other distributions. Anyway, sorry to hear that we couldn't help you. (No clue how to classify this one, so I'm picking INVALID...)