REALTEK RTL8139 ethernet card not detected Solved

[SFTMartin]

Using puppy 2.02 seamonkey installed on hd I fail to get the network card recognised.
I have installed from the wizard the driver for RTL8139 .

How to Ethernet tells me

So, after booting, do a cat /proc/ioports and verify that the full I/O space that the card will require is vacant.

but I don

[pmshah]

What kind of of a machine is it? It seems to be a very old laptop without any usb or ethernet on board. It is unlikely - although not impossible - to see a desktop with pcmcia interface.

A little more detail would help.

[SFTMartin]

Thanks for the reply. the machine is old but I would be delighted if I could get PUPPY to walk ( or run ) on the internet. It is a Compaq Presario desktop i686X1 from 1997. It features 64mb RAM and 333 Mhz. I got it with a USB added to the slot (which works) and have now added a PCMCIA card and an ethernet card into the next free slots - both of which I am now struggling to get to work.
Incidentally on dmesg among other info I get
.....
ACPI : unable to locate RSDP
.....
PCI : Found IRQ 11 for device 0000:00:03:0 (0004-> 0007)
PCI: Sharing IRQ 11 with 0000:01.00.0
......
Limiting direct PCI/PCI transfers

I don

[SFTMartin]

Sorry , I have to correct the information :
the three slots are
1) for a modem plug
2) pcmcia card
3) ethernetcard

the usb is not installed via an extra slot but was evidently factory installed.
Sorry for the mistake/confusion.

Martin

[pmshah]

What you could do is restart the pc & then hit the pause button to see the bios detected hardware list scrolling by. Should not be a problem on a 333 mhz machine. Please do verify that the network card is detected.

Next pull out the modem card & the pcmcia card. I wonder what it is doing in there in the first place. You probably don't need either. Try booting Puppy linux again. Network will most probably start working properly

Maybe there is a conflict of irq or the ethernet card has simply gone bad. Normally rtl8139 cards do not present a problem in any OS. You can also find a dos utility that will scan for presence of rtl8139 card & the interrupt setting & address. In any case even in a country like India these are avilbale under US$ 5/= should you require to replace it.

[Flash]

SFTMartin: welcome to Puppy

This is probably not relevant to your problem but so many people have problems running Puppy on machines that have less than 128 MB of RAM that I wonder if you'd mind describing how you did it. Did you already have a swap partition on your hard drive when you first booted Puppy from the CD? Or did you even boot Puppy from the CD to install it?

Thanks,

- Flash

[pmshah]

SFTMartin: welcome to Puppy

This is probably not relevant to your problem but so many people have problems running Puppy on machines that have less than 128 MB of RAM that I wonder if you'd mind describing how you did it. Did you already have a swap partition on your hard drive when you first booted Puppy from the CD? Or did you even boot Puppy from the CD to install it?

Thanks,

- Flash

Read the original post. He has it installed on the HD. You have problems in less than 128 mb ram only for Live CD, not otherwise. You night not need a fullfledged gui for installing to hard disk.

[SFTMartin]

thanks for the asssistance : I

[SFTMartin]

STOP PRESS
I have solved the problem... and it all boiled down to my own stupidity. I hadn