Hi, I'm leaving the entire quoted text below for context. I did finally get this issue resolved. I'm posting here for anyone else who runs into this. The problem is that I got a new E1000 NIC. They are good cards but the driver supplied with the kernel is old. I'll spare you the details of downloading and compiling drivers, but basically I was left with four installed kernels, none of which worked exactly right. The first was 2.4.17 which I didn't use for obvious reasons. The server is designed for 2.6 kernels and I don't think a 2.4 kernel would run anymore. It goes back to the Woody install floppy I think. The second is 2.6.18-6-686 which is part of the standard set of Etch kernel packages. The problem there was that Speakup wouldn't build without recompiling and I didn't have hours to recompile because I was on a deadline. It did build the newer E1000 driver though. The third kernel was 2.6.24-speakup which is my custom built kernel that I announced here. The problem with it wasn't Speakup since the Speakup core was built into the kernel and the synths were compiled as modules. The problem with that kernel is that since it was a custom kernel package, it didn't have the kbuild and tree packages. Finally, we get to the new etchnhalf kernel, also 2.6.24. That would, and did compile the driver but again no Speakup without recompiling the kernel from source. Therefore, I was left with a choice. Did I want speech and no NIC driver or a NIC driver with no speech? Software speech was also out of the question because of the time issue. Obviously, I could do nothing without speech, so speech won. I installed my custom 2.6.24-speakup kernel and all was fine with Speakup. I still had to compile the new E1000 driver as a module. I knew I was taking a chance, but I figured that since both the etchnhalf and custom kernels were 2.6.24, perhaps I could compile for one and it would work on the other. Remember, I couldn't compile for my custom kernel because the kbuild and linux-tree packages didn't exist for that kernel because it wasn't officially from Debian. So, after installing the necessary source and build packages for the etchnhalf kernel and moving symlinks around, I almost got it to work. I still got errors when running make from the src directory. As it turned out, the Makefile was setting the kernel version with "uname -r" which of course would never work. I removed that and hardcoded 2.6.24-etchnhalf.1-686 or whatever it was, I'm not remembering now. I again ran make and it made the modules for the etchnhalf kernel. Of course it installed the modules for that kernel and not my custom one which was actually running, so I manually copied the new e1000.ko module to the 2.6.24-speakup/drivers/net/e1000 directory. It finally worked, even though the reported versions were different from the kernel it compiled for and the one actually running. I did another symlink swap to make the custom kernel boot first (I had it set as /vmlinuz.old before) and rebooted. It still didn't work, but that was my fault. I forgot to update the initrd image. Always remember that if you're playing with modules and moving things around to run update-initramfs before rebooting or you're out of luck. I booted from the Gentoo live CD, 2003.4 I think, (it's old but it works), fixed the problem, remembered to run update-initramfs and ran out of space on the /boot partition. I moved files around (the .bmp files installed with Debian take a lot of space, by the way), ran it again and voila, all was well and it rebooted fine into the Speakup kernel with the correct E1000 driver. I still had a problem. Even after all of my effort, it still refused to see eth0. If I ran ifconfig, it would show the loopback interface but couldn't get information for eth0. Even manually setting ifconfig eth0 to an IP address only got an error. I kept trying things like loading and unloading the module, but nothing helped. It was especially frustrating because the Gentoo CD had no problem with the card and I verified that pinging a llocal machine worked. I'm not sure what finally gave me the idea, but I finally thought of looking in /etc/udev. I personally don't like udev but that's how Etch and new Debian releases do things. I did a grep for eth0 and found nothing, but under /etc/udev/rules.d, I found z25_persistent_net_rules. That held the key. Apparently, it assigned the E1000 to eth3 and wouldn't change it, even though the E1000 was the only NIC in the machine. I moved the file out of the directory in hopes it would generate a new one, but the new one still identified it as eth3. I changed the 3 to a 0, rebooted again and voila, it worked and showed up as eth0 like it was supposed to. I should still sort out the mess of four different kernels installed, but at least the new card works and I have Speakup if I need it. As I said, I hope this is of help to someone in the future who has a similar problem. Always check everything, even if it isn't obvious. As it turned out, probably all I needed to do in the first place is change the eth3 to eth0 and it would've worked, but the manufacturer driver was a lot newer than the 2.6.18 kernel included and seemed newer than that with 2.6.24 so I consider rebuilding the driver to be justified. I also now realize the problem with custom kernel packages and I probably won't make them in the future. However, if you don't need to build modules and don't require the kernel sources, my 2.6.24-speakup kernel works great, both in Etch and Lenny. I've personally tested it on two systems with two different synthesizers. The packages are still available: http://baechler.net.nyud.net/debian/ http://baechler.net/debian/ if the above doesn't work If something is unclear or you have feedback, write here or off-list. I'm sure there are things I could've done differently, but I had no way to go online while I was working on the NIC driver because it couldn't find the card, so I think I did the best I could under the circumstances. I'll just close by saying that I ran out of space on /boot so make sure the /boot partition is big enough, especially if you're going to have multiple kernels installed. Samuel Thibault wrote: > Tony Baechler, le Wed 13 Aug 2008 01:38:03 -0700, a ?crit : > >> Does this mean that I can't build Speakup without recompiling the >> kernel, even if I only want modules? >> > > Yes. Only recent kernels, or that have been patched, can let speakup > work as modules. > > >> Should I try installing a new kernel from Lenny instead? >> > > The kernel from Lenny should be fine yes. > > Samuel >
