It's an Atom board known as "Johnstown".

Can't get the ethernet to work (it's a gigE, Realtek), the rest of the
installation seems to work fine.


I was hoping someone else on the list has this board and has found a
debian install iso which will work.


5.03 most definitely does not. It installs the r8169 driver, which
seems to be broken.


Any help _greatly_ appreciated (as you can tell by the time :-)

Brian





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On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 01:44:42AM -0800, brian wrote:
> It's an Atom board known as "Johnstown".
>
> Can't get the ethernet to work (it's a gigE, Realtek), the rest of
> the installation seems to work fine.
>
> I was hoping someone else on the list has this board and has found a
> debian install iso which will work.
>
> 5.03 most definitely does not. It installs the r8169 driver, which
> seems to be broken.
have you tried getting the realtek driver and using it. I had to do this
for 2.6.25-~29 until the mainline r8169 came up to speed


>
> Any help _greatly_ appreciated (as you can tell by the time :-)
>
> Brian
>
>
>
>
>

--
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Hi Alex,

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 01:44:42AM -0800, brian wrote:

It's an Atom board known as "Johnstown".

Can't get the ethernet to work (it's a gigE, Realtek), the rest of
the installation seems to work fine.

I was hoping someone else on the list has this board and has found a
debian install iso which will work.

5.03 most definitely does not. It installs the r8169 driver, which
seems to be broken.



> have you tried getting the realtek driver and using it. I had to do
this

> for 2.6.25-~29 until the mainline r8169 came up to speed

oh, where to begin.

the realtek page (curse them !!!!) says that the kerner driver is just
fine.


of course, the #@$! idiots don't tell you which version of the kernel
that applies to. $#@!!! morons.


Then there's the problem that using the netinst install doesn't give
you enough tools to be able to

build a driver anyway.

So I figure my best option is to use a full CD install of either
debian testing or ubuntu 9.xx to get

the latest drivers in hopes that they will work.

I was hoping someone could identify a disty that would work for sure
before I descend into hell once more.


I assume from your post that kernels >= 2.26.30 work ?

And this is for a Johnstown board or some other board that you think
has the same chipset ?


There seems to be a lack of coherent information about this stupid
chipset.


realtek has just joined ati as something I will never spend money on
again. Intel is about to join that list too.


Intel's web page for the board says that Ubuntu 8.10 works with the
"native" drivers. 8.10 is ancient, and is probably the

same vintage as Lenny, right ? So this thing should already be working.



Any help _greatly_ appreciated (as you can tell by the time :-)


I was up late goofing around with this. Linux, still the same after
all these years :-(


Brian



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> realtek has just joined ati as something I will never spend money on
> again. Intel is about to join that list too.

Huh, if you blacklist Realtek (Realtek chips are found almost
everywhere...), Intel and Ati, given that Ati belongs to AMD, it's
likely you won't spend much money on computers in the future :-)


> Intel's web page for the board says that Ubuntu 8.10 works with the
> "native" drivers. 8.10 is ancient, and is probably the
> same vintage as Lenny, right ? So this thing should already be working.

No. 8.10 stands for 2008, October, whereas Lenny was released in
February, 2009. That being said, Lenny is the most vintage of these
distros (shipping with 2.6.26, whereas 8.10 is shipping 2.6.27).

Regards.


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On Wed, 11 Nov 2009, Jean-François Pirlet wrote:


realtek has just joined ati as something I will never spend money on
again. Intel is about to join that list too.


Huh, if you blacklist Realtek (Realtek chips are found almost
everywhere...), Intel and Ati, given that Ati belongs to AMD, it's
likely you won't spend much money on computers in the future :-)



maybe that's not a bad thing. Then I won't be up late at night. :-)




Intel's web page for the board says that Ubuntu 8.10 works with the
"native" drivers. 8.10 is ancient, and is probably the
same vintage as Lenny, right ? So this thing should already be working.


No. 8.10 stands for 2008, October, whereas Lenny was released in
February, 2009. That being said, Lenny is the most vintage of these
distros (shipping with 2.6.26, whereas 8.10 is shipping 2.6.27).



So, more confusing. Supposedly 8.10 works, so that would lead me to
believe that Lenny should work. It seems hard to believe that the driver
broke from .26 to .27. More than likely the #%@!^^ wankers at realtek
rev'ed the chip and so what I have is misidentified or has some other
ridiculous problem, i.e. it is not the same chip that the MB originally
started shipping with. This is a common problem.


Realtek is everywhere and yet, miraculously, I seem to be the only one
with this problem. I found one other site, also trying to install Lenny,
and they apparently fixed it with r8138. That didn't work for me.


And really, no one seems to know what's going on, including realtek, who's
website says it works, but fails to tell you which version. Very
frustrating. And unfortunately, after many years of linux, still very
common.


Brian

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 06:41:54AM -0800, brian wrote:
>
>
> Hi Alex,
>
> On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 01:44:42AM -0800, brian wrote:
> >It's an Atom board known as "Johnstown".
> >

[snip]

>
> And this is for a Johnstown board or some other board that you think
> has the same chipset ?

I think you have read too much into my email, I have no experience with
this board, but I have had problems with realtek nic's before, and the
solution was to use the realtek driver.

can I suggest probably the easiest way to check is get a latest live cd
and boot from there, they normally have the newest kernels on them


>
> There seems to be a lack of coherent information about this stupid
> chipset.
>
> realtek has just joined ati as something I will never spend money on
> again. Intel is about to join that list too.
>
> Intel's web page for the board says that Ubuntu 8.10 works with the
> "native" drivers. 8.10 is ancient, and is probably the
> same vintage as Lenny, right ? So this thing should already be working.
>
> >
> >Any help _greatly_ appreciated (as you can tell by the time :-)
>
> I was up late goofing around with this. Linux, still the same after
> all these years :-(
>
> Brian
>
>
>

--
"The United States Congress was right to renew the terrorist act -- the Patriot Act."

- George W. Bush
09/07/2006
Atlanta, GA

On Nov 11, 2009, at 11:55 AM, Alex Samad wrote:

can I suggest probably the easiest way to check is get a latest live
cd

and boot from there, they normally have the newest kernels on them



Yes !!! Problem solved. I am the proud owner of a Sid, or squeeze (?),
installation.


I'd like to take a little time to explain what I did for those who
fall into a similar situation.



I used this iso (The sid distro appears to use the 2.6.30 kernel):

http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/daily-builds/daily/arch-latest/i386/iso-cd/debian-testing-i386-netinst.iso

Overall I find the linking to all of the different versions somewhat
confusing. For example there is a link to weekly builds

which points to a directory tree which does not have anything in it.

The problem is that getting the right vmlinuz and initrd.gz is
important and I can't remember where I got them, because of all

the confusing links. I'm pretty sure it was from here:

/debian/dists/sid/main/installer-i386/current/images/hd-media

I used the sysconfig method on a flash stick, which was very easy and
worked exactly as appears in the installation

instructions.

Now here's the really important part:

I HAD TO UNPLUG THE POWER TO THE MOTHERBOARD.

Unbelievably the ethernet hardware seems to have gotten stuck and
power off-on using the power button did NOT fix it. The fact
that the ethernet could stay in such a state really points to how bad
a job someone did on the design of either the

motherboard or the LAN chip hardware.

The key to this problem, which I was slow to realize, was that lspci
did NOT show the LAN pci device.


So I physically disconnected power, plugged it back in, and booted
using the prepared filesystem.


Held my breath and the ethernet was detected !

Strangely the system seems to be referring to "squeeze" instead of sid
(?).



Well, that was a pain :-(

I don't know whether one of my other install attempts would have
worked had I realized that
the power needed to be physically disconnected. I have seen this
behavior on another computer and what is highly
coincidental is that it was also the ethernet which was having a
problem on that computer.


I have had some hiccups and have noticed that several times when re-
starting the installation I have to unplug the power.
Aaaaah, quality Intel hardware. Well at least it _mostly_ worked out
of the box...


Brian






There seems to be a lack of coherent information about this stupid
chipset.

realtek has just joined ati as something I will never spend money on
again. Intel is about to join that list too.

Intel's web page for the board says that Ubuntu 8.10 works with the
"native" drivers. 8.10 is ancient, and is probably the
same vintage as Lenny, right ? So this thing should already be
working.




Any help _greatly_ appreciated (as you can tell by the time :-)


I was up late goofing around with this. Linux, still the same after
all these years :-(

Brian





--
"The United States Congress was right to renew the terrorist act --
the Patriot Act."


- George W. Bush
09/07/2006
Atlanta, GA



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> Strangely the system seems to be referring to "squeeze" instead of sid
> (?).


Well, if you have used the testing-netinst, that's pretty normal (unless
you have configured your sources.list to Sid). Squeeze is the current
Testing distro. Sid is the Unstable distro.


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