Calling all geeks!! Help!!

[hex]

Hi, all...

Hopefully some one in here can help me get rid of M$ for good.

OK here is the problem....I recently bought a laptop, I am on a tight budget, so I could not be too picky.

I bought a Com-crap-Q Very-Sorry-E-O 700 (compaq presario 700).  First thing I did after I got it home was, check out it everything worked under XP. The second thing I did was to install Red Hat 7.1 (On seperate partions).  Everything went fine, until it went boot for the first time....OH NO!! I got half way thru the boot process and so far so good.....then it got to eth0 ....it just sits there.  It does not time out, it just sits there.  
The ethernet card is integrated (obviously) and uses RealTek RTL8139 drivers under Win XP.  I found drivers to d/l.  But how can I install them if I can not even get to a command line?
I guess after all this long winded explaniation, I am asking:

Does any one know of a distrubution of Linux that supports (naive support) the RealTec RTL8139 drivers??

I have searched and can only find people with the same problem, but no one with a solution.  (Actually some one suggested to slip in source code and recompile....I dont know, or have the time right now to figure out how to do that.)

Any suggestions are welcome,
Thanks
hex

[ February 21, 2002: Message edited by: hex ]

[ February 21, 2002: Message edited by: hex ]

[Centurian]

Hey,

Hmmm if your computer is not connected to a network it will take a long time when you boot for eth0 to clear. Basically it will check like a billion times for a network then will finally fail. I found that out the hard way.  

I have realtek 8139 ethernet cards on my network and they work fine with both Redhat 7.2 and Mandrake 8.1. The drivers are included in both of  OS's.


 

quote:Originally posted by hex:


I bought a Com-crap-Q Very-Sorry-E-O 700 (compaq presario 700).  First thing I did after I got it home was, check out it everything worked under XP. The second thing I did was to install Red Hat 7.1 (On seperate partions).  Everything went fine, until it went boot for the first time....OH NO!! I got half way thru the boot process and so far so good.....then it got to eth0 ....it just sits there.  It does not time out, it just sits there.  
The ethernet card is integrated (obviously) and uses RealTek RTL8139 drivers under Win XP.  I found drivers to d/l.  But how can I install them if I can not even get to a command line?
I guess after all this long winded explaniation, I am asking:

Does any one know of a distrubution of Linux that supports (naive support) the RealTec RTL8139 drivers??

]

[hex]

Hmm...
By long time, what do you mean??
I can not remember exactly how long I let it sit there, but I am sure that it was at least over 5 minutes.  Surely it should not take over 5 minutes for the entire boot process. (Duron 900, 256 meg).  Or could it take that long on the initial boot??
Thanks for your reply, maybe I will try RH 7.2.

hex

[voidmain]

You don't have to wait for it to time out. You have a few other alternatives.  For one you can boot in single user mode "linux single" at the LILO/GRUB prompt.  Other option is to press "I" at the red RedHat 7.1 on bootup which will give you an "interactive" startup where you can say "no" to network.

[hex]

Thanks Void Main();
I never heard of either of theese options, I guess that I am still a Linux newbie.  Refresh my memory...to get to select from LILO you would press TAB before OS begins to load?? Then you would type "linux single" ?? What is linux single mode??

Thanks
hex  

[triston1976]

SuSE 7.3 gives you the ability to do your initial setup w/out activating your network card at all (the default is inactive)...after your confident your linux install was successful you can easily run the Yast2 utility to walk through the network activation...

[voidmain]

quote:Originally posted by hex:
Thanks Void Main();
I never heard of either of theese options, I guess that I am still a Linux newbie.  Refresh my memory...to get to select from LILO you would press TAB before OS begins to load?? Then you would type "linux single" ?? What is linux single mode??

Thanks
hex    

Yes you can press TAB and whatever the label is for your linux boot type that plus "single" at the end of it.  This will boot your machine in Single User Mode (init 1).  Runlevel 1 does not start networking or any other daemons, it's basically a maintenance mode (same goes for any other SysV like *NIX).

[voidmain]

quote:Originally posted by SuSEFuckingRulZ:
SuSE 7.3 gives you the ability to do your initial setup w/out activating your network card at all (the default is inactive)...after your confident your linux install was successful you can easily run the Yast2 utility to walk through the network activation...

He's not running SuSe.  BTW, why doesn't SuSe provide an ISO image of their i386 version for free?  They provide Sparc but not x86...

[hex]

Thank you everyone for all your help.  I think now I might be able to get linux on to my laptop. Now for the hard part....finding time to do it!  

hex
   

BTW, Nice community here at forum.fuckmicrosoft.com......
I might hang out here for a while.

[billy_gates]

I have tried Mandrake, RedHat, and SuSE.

Mandrake is easy but, not easy enough,
RedHat can't even spell easy.
SuSE is the most awesome distro of Linux ever.

I would say they don't provide an ISO free for the same reason that u can't get Opera with no adds for free. They are both just too damn good to be free. SuSE is definietely worth $40, go out and try it, I guarantee you'll never look back to Mandrake and definitely not RedHat ever again,

Hell, SuSE linux even has a partition resizer for all Unix/Linux partitions and FAT partitions. So now more reformatting windows. (even though that is the only way it works even halfasses)

[voidmain]

I don't need to buy it.  The CD *is* on the net, just not in ISO format. I can recursively download the CD and create my own ISO but I'm not going to do that. It depends on what you use Linux for and how familiar you are with it as to how easy it is.  In my opinion RedHat is easier than any of the ones you mention (but I do far more server work than desktop).

And SuSe is in no way like Opera because SuSe is open source and under the GPL license.  Opera is closed source.  And besides, all Linux distros are basically the same. 95% of the code is common on all distros.  Now maybe SuSe has a fancy shmancy graphical admin tool, but I don't use graphical admin tools.  I am very happy that SuSe does have this though, if it can bring more people over from the dark side it's nothing but a plus.  Glad to hear you are having success.  Keep on going, it only gets better.

[triston1976]

void Main()
{//I'm not sure about the SuSE image?

cout>>"I didn't try to download it!">>endl;

}//I bought the 7 cd distribution

[voidmain]

void main () {
  /* I bought the 7 CD set */
  printf("Why don't you mail me a copy?\n");
}