Friday, March 11, 2011

Detect Agere Systems ET-131x Ethernet controller on fresh install of Fedora 14

Recently I’m trying on Linux and particularly got interested with Fedora. Well one reason is because our server is running on Fedora and curious as I am, I’ve installed one in one my workstation. My curiosity got me going, so I tried to put one also in my LG Xnote P1 laptop. So there, done with the installation, however got problems with my Ethernet controller (Agere Systems ET-131x). So I tried to pull some strings from the net and search for solutions. Several hits came up, unfortunately for FC 11/12 (Installing Agere ET-131x driver for Fedora 11/12) or lower versions. For 2 days I kept on looking for solutions, and I just don’t want to give up. Some sort of a personality in me. Anyway, I stumbled upon an error when I tried installing the said driver in the aforementioned blog that made me think that I probably don’t have an updated kmod (and the driver is for FC 11/12, right?). So what is kmod? According to Chapter 11 of Linux Device Drivers, 2nd Edition, kmod is a facility meant to save you from recompiling your modules each time you upgrade your kernel. So you don’t have to compile your drivers before installing them. (Whew! Thanks a lot!) So without further ado, here are the steps that I did to work around Agere’s ET-131x etherboot controller problem in  my LG XNote P1 notebook with Fedora Core 14 – Kernel version 2.6.35.6-45.fc14.i686.
  1. Download staging-kmod-commons first because it is needed by the next package. For my installation, I used  version 2.6.35.6-1.fc14.noarch.rpm.
  2. Install using rpm: $ rpm -Uvh filename.rpmI suggest to autocomplete the filename since it’s a bit long.
  3. Download kmod-staging rpm for i686. You can find the rpm list by name, packages starting with K. Mine is version 2.6.35.6-45.fc14.i686-2.6.35.6-1.fc14.i686
  4. Install using rpm: $ rpm -Uvh filename.rpm
  5. Reboot then it will automatically detect the eth0 for you, installed driver for your ET-131x Ethernet controller and a working network. :)
So there you have it, I hope this post helps.

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Share

Twitter Delicious Facebook Digg Stumbleupon Favorites More