[SOLVED] NIC setup iMac w/Yellowdog

[Davy]

howdy, ya'll !!!

I was in a mood for some self-punishment, so i decided install yellowdog on an old imac (G3 233MHz) that i managed to get my hands on.

The installation seemed to go off without a hitch, but i snagged one problem as i tried to run it: NO NETWORK CONNECTION!!! (I have a home ethernet network controlled by a router and it worked fine with i had mac os 8.5 running).

I looked at yellowdog's documentation and it pointed me towards a gui-based config window that detects the network card itself (a GMAC [Sun GEM]).

i set it up to boot dhcp and restart the machine. on boot up i see that eth0 fails to initiliaze and the reason given is that device is not present . so i go back to the config gui and, after some poking around, i find that there's no irq allocated to the network card.

should i assign one and, if so, which one?

i'll wait in strained anticipation for your clever responses. :) and (as always) thank you all so much for the help!

[DSwain]

Hmm one thing that may be good to do is figure out exactly what network card the Mac has. Is it an intergrated card or is it a card which was added on? It's rather critical to know this part. Next, once you ID'ed the NIC, I would check and find out which module the NIC uses and see if it's loading the module at all. Also do you know whether the card is faulty or not?

[Davy]

the card is a a GMAC [Sun GEM] that originally came with the iMac. it is an integrated card and i know it's not faulty because it works when i use the mac os (8.5).

i don't think that the problem lies with the module; but i wouldn't know how to tell because neither modprobe nor lsmod are valid commands.

i wouldn't suppose you know how to find out? :D

[DSwain]

Well sadly I don't really know all that much about usage with Yellowdog, let alone Mac hardware alongside Linux. What I would suspect is the case is that Yellowdog's utilities could inform you which module it is loading for the card. Strange enough that lsmod isn't a command... that's no good. I might be a bit too limited in helping you out in this case but if you want to try and figure out which module it uses, I'd try searching it on Google as I don't know a better way to do this (or easier way rather.)

[Davy]

s'ok... i figured not too many would know.

HA!!! i was wrong... modprobe and lsmod exist... they're just not in my path... i have to ./sbin/modprobe and ./sbin/lsmod to make 'em work.

besides that: is there a way to find out what irq's are being used.

[Davy]

according to yellowdog's documentation, there are no issue with my network card... so it should be working.

maybe if there were a way to find out what irq's aren't already being using i could set it up manually.

i would also need a way to find out how to set up the other other issues like mem and io so i can get it to work.

[Davy]

FIXED:

apparently, the yellow dog installation incorrectly detected my network card. you have to modprobe bmac and it'll start working.

to have it work for good, you just need to change the /etc/modprobe.conf to have alias eth0 bmac