Have you tried ndiswrapper? It is a wrapper that allows you to use the Windows XP drivers in linux.

Ndiswrapper is designed for wireless cards.
 
Is this a nForce chipset motherboard?
 
What make and model?
 
Mandrake 2005 (Limited Edition), Fedora Core 4 or SuSE 9.3 will work fine. It does on my system.
 
The Marvell chipsets are new and require a newer distro to work.

I have the same problem with my Shuttle SB86i, which has the Marvell 88E8053 gig ethernet card. I simply can't get this thing to connect!
 
I've tried FC4 but with no success, so last week I got Fedora Core 5...but still nothing.
 
I'm a real Linux newbie, and I mostly bought this PC just so I could learn and tinker without any fear of destroying important data. So...I really have no clue what to do next.
 
Help is greatly appreciated!!

I tool a look at the specs. for your system. I bet the issue is that this card is attached to a PCI Express interface. It looks like some have found information on this and a script that works for the card, but, this assumes some knowledge with Linux and making this work. Support for PCI-E is just emerging and I wonder if the next version of Fedora will fair better.
 
Let me look around some more.
 
I did find this statement by Shuttle on Linux support. Did your system come with a driver CD that includes Linux drivers?

I find that very interesting danleff, becuase I am using the same hardware adn I have just successfully installed using a debian etch network install cd (EG. base system on teh cd but gets most packages off the internet) and this just worked! 100%! but now that I am in the system and in x windows my NIC no longer works. I have attempted just modprobe sk98lin and then using the NIC but this doens't work either.
 
lspci picks it up no problem, just says Marvell Technology 88E8053. any ideas?
 
** EDIT **
 
after some thought I decided to reboot off the CD again and see if I can work out what module it was loading during the install. So once past the network detection part I moved to another tty and had a look at the syslog. the module it loads is "sky2", have a look at my system afterwards no "sky2" on the system. time to find sky2!!!!!!!!
[Edited by warchild on 2006-07-10 04:43:49]
 

Quote:I find that very interesting danleff, becuase I am using the same hardware adn I have just successfully installed using a debian etch network install cd (EG. base system on teh cd but gets most packages off the internet) and this just worked! 100%!

By the same hardware, do you mean that you also have a Shuttle SB86i, or just what you think is the same NIC card?

If the former, you may have hit on the answer.

The sk98lin driver is for the Marvell Yukon chipset.

The 88E8053 seems to be the Marvell Yukon 2 chipset. Two different cards.

Quote:So once past the network detection part I moved to another tty and had a look at the syslog. the module it loads is "sky2", have a look at my system afterwards no "sky2" on the system.

I assume that you tried to load the sky2 driver by;

modprobe sky2?

Does it show up in ifconfig?

If yes, did you restart the Network or configure it for auto DHCP during boot?

I assume that you have broadband, not DSL, the latter which may need a username and password and be configured for DSL?

The other question is, do you have the kernel source installed on the Debian Etch system?

yes, I have a Shuttle SB86i.
 
and yes, I attempted to load sky2 from my system installation by using the command modprobe sky2 and hte module is not found in /lib/modules/<kernel version/kernel/drivers/net (from memory) and when I do that it says module not available.
 
and no, no kernel source. it's not there unless i can get the installer to do it which owuld be handy. In the end I have downloaded the latest kernel from kernel.org put it on a USB stick and copied it onto the shuttle. It has no QT or ncurses installed so I have jsut gone for a make oldconfig and during that process it asked me about the sky2 module and i've asked it to compile. Now I am stuck, i've done a kernel compile and i've tried too boot of it but it panic's. I noticed the old kernel has a initrd but I thought initrd was gone from 2.6.12 plus and nwo you need to use mkinitramfs. i've never used it so i'm googling now on how to make a new ram disk for boot time. mkinitrd is not installed on teh system but mkinitramfs is. any help would be great.
 
 
in /etc/kernel-img.conf it has a line
do_initrd = yes does this mean it's using initrd-tools still or just teh same name but still using mkinitramfs?
[Edited by warchild on 2006-07-11 02:11:06]
 

I did some looking around. It appears that the sky2 module was not included in the base Debian kernel. However, you are compiling from scratch and that seems to present some new challenges w/o mkinitrd support.
 
Take a look at this post on the subject.
 
In terms of sky2 support, also look at this thread on sky2. It's for a notebook, but look under the lan section.

UPDATE TIME! I have it working! w00t!
 
ok, after some googling I found out that i need to do a update-initramfs –k 2.6.17.4 –c initrd-2.6.17.4
 
I now have a new initrd file in my boot dir. I then edited and created teh grub entry for it and tried too boot. At first it got booting and then tried to mount boot and errored out saying "device /dev/sda1 does not exist". I had a look in /dev/sd* and found that all the HDD devices had been changed to /dev/sdc* not /dev/sda* so I changed my grub/menu.1st and /etc/fstab to reflect this and the OS booted!! w00t!
 
I found thou that the sky2 module didn't load on boot time even thou it's in /etc/modules (maybe I need ot put it somewhere else?????).
 
I then did a modprobe sky2 and the module loaded, I then did a /etc/init.d/network restart and found that the NIC still didn't detect. I tried ifup eth0 and then gods be praised DHCP kicked in and look at that........ my NIC works.
 
Thanks for your help danleff, it's really appreciated and I thought it a good idea to put it up on how I got it working. Last but not least thou, how do I get taht module loading and the NIC detecting on boot time?
 
Thanks.
 
 
** EDIT **
 
/etc/modules is the correct location, for who knows what reason it just didin't work that first time.... i've rebooted a couple of times since now and it's 100%.
[Edited by warchild on 2006-07-11 04:15:59]
 

Great!
 
unpocoloco, if you are still there, we now know how to get it going in Fedora. If you stuck with us, let us know and we will try to guide you through it.

Hi Folks,
 
Linux noobie here. =) Just yesterday I have bought a Shuttle SB86i, very nice box. However, trying to install a Debian Etch netinstall renders the unnice surprise of Debian not recognizing the network card. Reading the posts in this thread I see that there is a solution to this. Compiling the kernel... wouldn't be easy itself, but how do you compile a kernel without a running linux installation? Even Knoppix won't start. =(
 
I do not specifically have to stick to Debian, it's just the only system I know a bit.
 
Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks a lot in advance,
Philipp