network cark problem under 2.6.3
 

Hi Everybody! Im new to LQ and I think the site is great so far. Anyway, I hope someone here can help me.
I'm running slack 9.1 on an old pentium 166, with 2 realtek 8139c ethernet cards (It's eventually going to be my router/firewall). Right now I have it plugged into a hub with my dsl router and some other machines.

Now here's my problem: I just upgraded the kernel from 2.4.22 to 2.6.3 and now my ethernet card can't contact the dhcp server. I made sure the eth card settings were the same in the new .config file. lspci shows the cards are being detected but at boot it says eth0: link down.
I know this is not the case because when i boot into my old kernel the problem is gone.
I can't ping anything besides 127.0.0.1. ifconfig only brings up the lo interface.

Anybody got ideas?

Thanx in advance

When I recompiled the kernel my /etc/rc.d/rc.modules was modified - I had to edit it and uncomment parts concerning loading modules for my network card. Are u sure that u have either network card module loaded (lsmod) or support for your network card built-in in the kernel?

I have support built into the kernel. I am at work so I can't give exact options right now but I know I have support for it compiled into the kernel, using similar options as that of the 2.4 kernel.

Anybody?

How did you compile the kernel? I don't think you can use the old config when you go to the 2.6 kernel. I might be wrong though. Here's what I did

make xconfig
make
make modules_install install

That's the method for compilation I used as well. To make the 2.6 config file I opened the 2.4 config in make oldconfig (in 2.6.3 directory) and went through all options. Then I opened it in make menuconfig and went through all options to make sure they were the same as in 2.4, or else i read the help and adjusted those options to fit my system. The only problem I am having is that when I boot up into the 2.6.3 kernel I see the message "eth0: link down" and nothing I do will bring the card up.