"The Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

Plug and Pray Problems

From Tony Grant on Mon, 14 Dec 1998

Hi,

Problem: USR Sportster ISDN TA will not work on AMD K-6/II machine.

Solution: Force D-Link Ethernet card to use IRQ 5 and ioports in the 0300 - 031f range so as not to interfere with the ioports needed by the Sportster.

Question: How do I force the Ethernet card to behave? On bootup my kernel (2.0.36) tells me that IRQ / io etc are being set by BIOS. I want to set them myself.

TIA for pointers to the correct doc.

Cheers
Tony Grant

My first guess would be that you're encountering a problem with some "ISA Plug and Play" adapters. The first option would be to see if there's a setting to disable "plug and pray" on one or both of these boards, and manually set them (possibly using an MS-DOS or Windows) utility).

Failing that you can look for a Linux package called 'isapnptools' --- I've never used it --- but it seems to have helped a few people out there.

I've read many messages from people who've resorted to booting DOS, running the configuration utilities from there and then loading their Linux kernel via LOADLIN.EXE.

This is more of a workaround than a real solution --- but it seems to be effective for most and I don't know of any downside for normal operation (just that mild distaste that running MS-DOS to configure you hardware every time you boot might leave in your mouth). Console yourself with the fact that you rarely have to reboot Linux.

Plug and Pray Problems

From Tony Grant on Mon, 14 Dec 1998

Jim Dennis wrote:

..snip

This is more of a workaround than a real solution --- but it seems to be effective for most and I don't know of any downside for normal operation (just that mild distaste that running MS-DOS to configure you hardware every time you boot might leave in your mouth). Console yourself with the fact that you rarely have to reboot Linux.

Jim,

Thanks for your prompt reply if only M$ offered such aftersales support

Loadlin looks like a last resort solution that I will have to turn to. I really didn't want to install W$ or DOS on this machine (it is a headless server) so booting is no problem, the machine is up all of the time, only SW upgrades will imply rebooting.

Cheers and thanks again

Tony Grant

Copyright © 1999, James T. Dennis
Published in The Linux Gazette Issue 36 January 1999

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