Fedora 17 and RTL8139 Network Card Problems

[agmsmith]

Just in case someone else tries to install Fedora 17 Linux on an Intel 440BX based motherboard with dual 550Mhz Pentium III processors and a Realtek RTL8139 ethernet card, here are some tips for getting it to work

Comments

[johnnyfavorite]

man. it's crap like this that makes me glad i am not a linux user. (heh)

way back in 1998, when i first decided that i could not in good conscience continue to be a windows user, linux was the first thing i tried. i got it installed okay, but every little thing i tried to change was a major pain in the ass. it always involved finding some obscure prefs file, and finding some line within that prefs file that was more or less indistinguishable from modem line noise, and then changing an X to a 3 or something dumb like that, and then restarting the window manager. not my idea of a good time. and as we all know, i eventually settled on beos instead.

do you use linux as your full-time os? even when my full-time job was writing linux server programs, i did not. with judicial use of #ifdefs and driver-like coding principles, i could do 95 percent of my coding, testing, and debugging on a mac, then do my final deployments on linux boxes.

[agmsmith]

I don't have a full time OS, BeOS works for mail and simple web browsing and Usenet. I have to reboot into Linux or Windows 2K to use Firefox for WordPress and other Javascript heavy web sites. Thus my interest in using virtual machines on my next PC. Not sure if the host OS would be Windows 7 or Linux. Whatever it is, if I'm buying it, I want it to last 10 years or so. I had considered buying a Mac, but the pricing is high, the lifetime is low (5 years before OS support is dropped), and they don't have ECC memory except on their obsolete workstation offering. So I'll make do with my firesale i5 office PC, which is modern enough to have virtual machine support in the instruction set.

[agmsmith]

One additional trick is to use the command "divider=32" on the GRUB command line used to boot Linux. That slows the timer from 1000hz down to about 30hz, reducing the interrupt handling load on the processor. Makes things negligibly faster. But it still eventually crashes with intensive network activity, such as using WordPress to edit a web page post.

[agmsmith]

Yay, they fixed it in Fedora 18. Now I can back up photos over the network at 100Mb/s all night long!