Here is a follow up. I could not get any tulip-based driver to recognize the FA311. I did a web search and found that the tulip driver supported FA310 cards, but the chipset was changed on the FA311 and the natsemi driver is required instead. Funny, the Netgear driver on the CD has yet a different name, so I suspect something is different from the stock natsemi driver.
Going back to the natsemi driver, I was able to get some communication through after several attempts - almost like some kind of delay caused by misconfiguration which eventually fixed itself. However even after getting pings and dns requests through, I was still seeing the "eth0: PIC error 0x800000" message come up repeatedly. And not getting communication working right away makes me suspicious that there could be other hidden problems. I will work towards installing a 2.4 kernel to see if the natsemi driver works any better. If not, I'll try building and configuring the Netgear driver. Are 2.4 ethernet drivers supposed to work with 2.6 kernels, or is some modification required to accomplish that? If I find out no mods are required, I could try compiling the 2.6 kernel with the Netgear driver first to stay with the 2.6 kernels. As I write this I'm thinking I should probably be looking for info at kernel.org or some kernel mailing list instead of bothering you guys with the questions here. Just wanted to keep you all up-to-date. BTW, this is a lower priority project for me. Thanks for your help so far, - Alex -----Original Message----- From: Alex Stagg [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, March 03, 2005 11:35 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [gentoo-user] Install with Netgear FA311? Sorry, I also forgot to mention that although I've used RH and debian in the past, I'm a newbee to gentoo and I'm not sure how to use the tulip driver instead of the natsemi driver during the install. But I'll try to somehow deactivate the device, rmmod, insmod and reactivate it. - Alex -----Original Message----- From: Christopher Fisk [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, March 03, 2005 10:47 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [gentoo-user] Install with Netgear FA311? On Thu, 3 Mar 2005, Alex Stagg wrote: > I think the NIC is good - it is brand new. Sorry I forgot to mention > that I have WinNT4 installed on another partition with the Netgear > driver and I have no networking problems (no symptoms, also checked > the event logs) when running that. I dunno if it sill applies these > days but I also tried changed the machine's BIOS settting for an > "other OS" (the other option for that is a "Windows OS"). It used to > be this kind of thing had to be set for the PCI bus to get set up by > the BIOS. I think I tried it both ways. This is an older machine > (400Mhz AMD K6). Did using the tulip driver help? Christopher Fisk -- A boy without mischief is like a bowling ball without a liquid center. -- Homer Simpson, Lisa the Greek -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
