Re: Cannot get networking to work

Dave Stratford wrote:
Hi folks,

Sorry to bother you good folks again quite so soon, but I'm still
having problems with my new machine.

I've just installed FC5 to a brand spanking new machine. I've managed
to get most things working, including being able to use grub to boot
linux from an IDE drive, and W2k from a sata drive.

I do still have some problems though, and given my lack of experience
I've exhausted all my own thoughts and ideas.

Problem 1
The mouse pointer vanishes as soon as the login screen appears. This
is less important as I can get by without it, but it is irritating as
I have to guess where the mouse is pointing.

That's ugly. You could give us a hint as to what kind of mouse it is. And by
"login screen appears", I assume you mean the X login screen. Did it show up
during the installation, or did you text mode?

Problem 2
The ethernet device starts okay during boot-up, and the configuration
utilities all say that it is configured and working. It can ping
itself using both the loopback address and it's own IP address, but
it cannot ping anything else on the network, and nor can anything
else ping it.

I'm using static IP addresses throughout as one of the machines that
connects to the network runs RISCOS3.7 and this has no useful DHCP
support.

That's silly. So you hard-code that address and use DHCP for the rest of
your machines! No problem!

Ive added the appropriate IP to the hosts files of all the machines,
and added their IP's to the new machine. I tried disabling the
firewall just in case that was causing a problem. SElinux is
installed but only at warn level. I've tried reconfiguring the
network from scratch.

You used system-config-network? Or netconfig? And did you set your *NETMASK*
correctly? What does a broadcast ping say? Use "/sbin/ifconfig -a" to ge the
network information about all your ports, look for the "Bcast address" for
eth0, and use "ping -b [Bcast address]"

I know the hardware side is fine because when I boot into W2K I can
access the network and internet fine.

The ethernet chip is an nVidia CP51 on the motherboard.

Problem 3
This could be related to problem 2. I cannot run the software update
or add/remove software routines, as both then throw up a box saying
'Retrieving update[software] information', which then fail after
about 30 seconds saying 'Unable to retrieve update[software]
information'.

Well, yeah. No network, no updates.

I don't know whether this is relevant, various google links imply
not, but early on in the boot up process I get the following two
messages:

ACPI: Unable to load System Description Table

powernow-k8: BIOS error - no PSB or ACPI _PSS objects

Any ideas please, particularly on the networking.

Doesn't sound like a big problem.


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