More SIS900 Nightmares on an EasyNow PC

[GMFTatsujin]

Hello folks,

N00bie here. Please don't bite too hard. :)

I recently purchased an EasyNow PC for a steal... and it looks like you get what you pay for. I'm using Gentoo1.4_rc2, stage 3 for 586s, a K6-200 processor with 32MB. The BIOS is so far inaccessable - they use some variant of AWARD BIOS that I've never seen; it does not display POST results or provide a keystroke to enter a configuration utility that I can find. I'm apparently stuck with the hardware as is.

The kernel is detecting the on-board SIS900 and the module loads fine (no need to modprobe, though I can if I want to), but there is a quirk. Apparently this particular NIC has *two* network transcievers on it. The first is a HomePNA transciever that uses regular phonelines to create a network. The second transciever is a standard 10BaseT.

dmesg reports that the SIS900 module detects both of them, and always picks the HomePNA transciever as the default ETH0, since it's the first one to be detected. The 10BaseT transciever goes unused. I'm reasonably confident that if I had a complete HomePNA solution implemented at my house, I'd be online by now. Using industry-standard Cat-5 cables, however, I'm out of luck. Ain't that just the way of things.

Does anyone know if there's a way to force the SIS900.o module to pick the 10BaseT transciever? An option I can pass to the kernel or something? Has anyone else seen this?

If the direct output from dmesg will be helpful, I'll try to find a way to post it.

Thanks in advance,
GMFTatsujin

[Kawada]

Don't have any real solution, just a suggestion. Upon looking at the documentation for the sis900 kernel module, I think you may want to try messing around with /sbin/ifconfig. It looks like there's an option in ifconfig to configure the media type that your card will use (man ifconfig). Try screwing around with that and see if it works for you.
_________________
Kawada

2002 Nethack Tournament -- 317th runner-up http://nethack.devnull.net/