Re: IO

Ray Olszewski
2004-01-02T22:15:21Z

At 01:52 PM 1/2/2004 -0600, Jose Colmenares wrote:
> I posted a message about 5 days ago about troubles
>setting a LAN. Well, i still having figured it out,
>but have detected that i installed the wrong driver
>for my card. I have a isa RTL8019, wich i found out
>works with ne2000 support. But to set it i need to
>know the io and irq adress... ¿how could i find them?
>and also, after this ¿how do i made the proper changes
>to my system?

The "easy" way to do this is with the configuration program that came with
(or should have come with) the NIC. Inconveniently for us, these config
programs are almost always MS-DOS-based utilities (or, more rarely, Windows
based). If you can still find a copy of DR-DOS or FreeDOS for download (I
haven't looked for either in a couple of years, but once they were easy to
find), either of them will probably run any DOS-based config program you have.

A bit harder (perhaps; YMMV) is to use the configuration checker/setter for
NE2000 NICa available at http://www.scyld.com/network/ne2k-pci.html .

If you can do neither of these things ... isa NICs usually ship
preconfigured for io=0x300 and irq=0x3 . So you might try disabling (in the
BIOS) your second serial port (which will also be on irq=0x3), booting into
Linux, then trying

modprobe ne io=0x300 irq=0xA

Finally ... older isa NICs (including some NE2000s) get configured with
jumpers rather than a config program, If you have one of them, you'll be
playing blind man's bluff with the jumpers unless you can find
documentation for the card.

If you have occasion to ask more questions about your NIC, please include
in your message as much information about it as you know ... not just that
it uses the RTL8019 chipset.

>I'm runing slack 9.1. the command lsmod says there is
>a isa-pnp (wich could be my card),

Nope. lsmod provides a listing of kernel modules, not of cards. This module
is supposed to let kernels do PnP configuration of isa-based PnP hardware
... but I've never actually used it so can't help you with the details.
Since we don't even know if your NIC can be configured through PnP (some
isa NICs can, but many cannot), this is probably the wrong place to
focus for now.

>ifconfig only
>detects a loopback (wich i don't really know what is,

The command "ifconfig" will list only configured interfaces ... that is,
interfaces that have IP addresses. To see all interfaces, use "ifconfig
-a". But even this will report an eth0 interface only if a kernel module
has found a suitable NIC and created the interface.

>but is not of any help) and i have no eth0 (wich seems
>fine, since i have not been able to install any, but i
>figure i need to do so, or not?)

Yes. You need to insmod or modprobe the kernel module(s) for your NIC ...
ne is the right one to modprobe (as I recall, modprobe will notice and load
another module (8190.o,I think) that ne depends on.

Typically with this module, you do need to tell it the ioport and irq of
your NIC, so a proper invocation would resemble this (with the values
appropriate for your system):

modprobe ne io=0x300 irq=0xA

>Thanks.
>By the way, the answers i got on the last post help
>quite a lot, if not for solving the problem (wich was
>imposible since i did not ask for the correct
>information) for learning a few interesting things. Thanks!