I’ve just rebuilt a machine on what’s a pretty new standard motherboard (GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD3)
A fresh install of OpenSuse doesn’t work with some of it’s components mainly the usb ports and network card, to get it installed I had to use pci & pci-e usb port expansion cards and was hoping that I could then run a system update which would bring in a newer kernel and possibly then have the necessary drivers/firmwares to run my board’s devices
I tried for the best part of two days to get a network connection working though and failed miserably, even when disabling the onboard lan card in bios and using ‘known good’ pci lan cards I can’t get the network up, system seems unable to communicate with the router at all, with dhcp I get ‘waiting for dhcp data’, with static addressing (ifup in yast) the gateway isn’t being set and if I try ‘route add default gw 192.168.0.1’ I get a message saying no network is running
I’m at a bit of a loss here as to what to do other than wait for the next version of opensuse to be released, but I am wondering if I can ‘manually’ download and install a newer kernel to see if that helps, so I have two questions about that
Is it worth even trying?
How do I go about it?
Incidentally these issues aren’t limited to opensuse, I have the same problems with arch and also a mint disk I booted off as a test which is mainly what leads me to think it’s down to the ‘newness’ of the hardware. Curiously though, a two year old version of partedmagic I had lying around ran the usb ports without issue
You could get my bash script sakc and the latest kernel, like 3.10.5, put them on a disk and compile the new kernel offline on your new PC. The script normally goes into $HOME/bin as the file sakc and must be marked executable to be able to run. sakc expects the kernel to be located in $HOME/Downloads and will ask to create a new folder called $HOME/Kernel if it does not exist. With SAKC, you can install the very latest kernel and reboot to start using it by selecting it from the grub boot loader.
Before you go crazy though, go into YaST / Network Devices / Network Settings and make sure your network card is configured and be sure to select DHCP as some networks did not work because the openSUSE install did not configure the network device properly.
Thanks for the reply there James, only just getting to see it due to a very late session at the pub last night
It’s definitely not just a case of misconfigured settings during installation, I’ve spent way more than the usual time it would take to set up a network connection using both gui and console tools with dhcp and static addressing
I’m going to try the 13.1 milestone 3 first to see if it handles the hardware better but living in the back of beyond as I do it’ll be monday before I can buy some blank dvds so I’m gonna have to use a network install CD or a usb drive, both of those methods though rely on the very things I’m unable to get working thus far so I’m pretty much expecting to have as much luck as I get when I buy lottery tickets!
If that fails I’ll give the script you helpfully provide a go but I probably won’t have time to attempt it over the next few days
After trying a veritable plethora of networking cards, including some older pci & usb cards of both the ethernet and wireless varieties I’ve decided to admit defeat and not waste any more time on it and just get a different brand motherboard to try. Plain economics says it makes sense as I could probably have earned enough to buy another twenty boards in the time I’ve wasted on this!
Sounds wierd but there just seems to be something about this board that isn’t letting linux set a gateway address either with dhcp or ‘manually’ on ethernet or wi-fi, I would wonder if the board was faulty except that windows runs everything ok on it (except for one particular grahics card)
So it looks like I got another rebuild to look forward to and the wife’s windows machine will get a nice upgrade she didn’t expect … the joys of modern computing!
Let me say that there are lots of cheap pcie/pci wired and wireless adapters that work with Linux on almost any desktop. I keep one of each in my closet just in case. It is OK to start over, but other choices also exist. Also, in the last two cases, after two more major kernels came out, they started working (wired).