The Netgear FA411 contains the Asix AX88190 chipset and the fully compatible Linux driver is axnet_cs, however,
the FA411 is also backwards-compatible with (the more basic) NE2000 devices, using the pcnet_cs driver.
In theory you could use either driver, but you would only achieve the highest data throughput from the axnet_cs driver.
bugminer, I suggest you attack the problem in 2 stages;
First, delete any old fixes you have attempted, such as your BootManager settings.
Stage 1)
Both drivers claim the same device ID (and sub-device ID's) and it seems that the pcnet_cs driver gets priority ...
but there's code written into the pcnet_cs driver which should auto-detect any Asix-based devices and send a kernel-event to "bail out" and let the axnet_cs driver take over.
I have done some reading on the web about this portion of the driver code, and it seems that it's unreliable. I have found a patch (which is an update of an earlier patch) which might fix the problem ... but why bother!!
The most straightforward solution would be to disable the pcnet_cs driver, and this will let the axnet_cs driver do its job unencumbered.
So use ROX to browse to /lib/modules/2.6.33.2/kernel/drivers/net/pcmcia/
and there you will see the (driver) file "pcnet_cs.ko"
Open a second ROX window, which will default to the /root location, then drag pcnet_cs.ko into /root
Now you need to "register" the changed state of your system's drivers, by running this command -
Code: Select all
depmod-FULL
Stage 2)
It's possible that the axnet_cs driver may still be unreliable, and there are reports on the web of Asix-based devices having trouble interacting with a laptop's bios to get the correct resources (IRQ/DMA).
So using IRQ-related boot options, as rjbrewer suggested, is certainly a good idea, especially since you have an older laptop. I'm certainly familiar with this situation, since I originally used Puppy Linux back in 2005 with a VAIO Pentium1 !
First get into your laptop's bios and see if there's a setting for "PnP OS = YES/NO". If so, set it for "NO".
Save bios settings, reboot, and I suspect that will work well.
But if you don't have that bios option, or the device is still unreliable, these are the best three boot options you should try:
pci=biosirq
acpi=noirq
irqpoll routeirq