On Thu, 13 Sep 2001, Tom Gottheil wrote:

> I installed NetBSD on my laptop with a boot floppy and ftp install, and it
> worked perfectly detecting my MiniPCI Accton NIC as tlp0 and configuring it
> with DHCP.  However, when I rebooted, the card was not found.  I don't know
> if the driver was even configured in the generic kernel, because the install
> procedure does not install the kernel sources by default.

That's very odd, as the INSTALL kernel has always less than the
GENERIC kernel. Maybe another driver is messing up the card before the
tlp driver gets to it. You can browse the sources online, by the way,
at <http://cvsweb.netbsd.org>, and mirrors.

> For the same
> reason, I cannot configure anything new without downloading the kernel
> sources via the integrated NIC (sort of an infinite loop).  Is the tlp
> driver configured by default, and if so, why is it not working?

Well, yes it is, but if it's not working for whatever reason, you
could boot from the INSTALL kernel, but using the installed binaries,
rather than the ramdisk. Catch the booter while it's counting down,
and at the boot prompt ('> '), type "boot fd0a:netbsd -a". When
prompted for the location of the root file system and swap, give
"wd0a" and "wd0b", respectively.

> Also, the
> same is true of my 3com 3c3FEM656 Cardbus NIC, it is not detected at all
> (I'm not sure if it is supported anyway).

That one doesn't seem to be supported. The INSTALL and GENERIC kernels
don't do Cardbus anyway. For a laptop, you normally want to use the
bootlap.* floppies, which are built from INSTALL_LAPTOP, and which
install kern-laptop.tgz, which is built from GENERIC_LAPTOP. That may
not make a difference in this case, unless you have a different card
to try, but when you do build your custom kernel, you'll want to base
it on GENERIC_LAPTOP, so that the Cardbus is supported.

Is this an HP Pavillion laptop? For that, I found the MiniPC Accton
NIC didn't work with the bootlap.* floppies, but it did work with the
kern-laptop.tgz kernel. Something fishy is going on here! It's not
convenient for me to explore this -- it's my son's laptop -- but once
you're able to build kernels, you may be able to narrow down to
exactly one feature in GENERIC that's causing the problem.

Frederick