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At the time of installing the NIC card (e10000) was not supported by the available Debian kernels. Kernel 2.4.20 fixed this. A kernel was compiled from source and patched up to 2.4.20-pre11. The default .config (i.e., starting from no .config file) was the starting point. Below is recorded the specific configurations added.

# cd /usr/src # wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/linux-2.4.19.tar.gz # wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/testing/patch-2.4.20-pre11.gz # tar zxvf linux-2.4.19.tar.gz # cd linux-2.4.19 # gzip -dc ../patch-2.4.20-pre11.gz | patch -p1 -N -F4 # make menuconfig Processor type and features Processor family CONFIG_MPENTIUM4=y General CONFIG_APM=y CONFIG_APM_DO_ENABLE=y CONFIG_APM_CPU_IDLE=y CONFIG_APM_DISPLAY_BLANK=y CONFIG_APM_RTC_IS_GMT=y Block devices RAM disk support CONFIG_BLK_DEV_RAM=y Initial RAM disk (initrd) support CONFIG_BLK_DEV_INITRD=y Network device support Ethernet (1000 Mbit) CONFIG_E1000=y Sound CONFIG_SOUND_ICH=y # make-kpkg clean # make-kpkg --append-to-version -gjw --revision sis01 --initrd kernel_image # cd .. # wajig install kernel-image-2.4.19-gjw_sis01_i386.deb

This works just fine and all standard drivers (CDROM and NFS) were included by default and the e1000 support included in the kernal. The resulting kernel is quite a bit smaller that the kernels supporting lots of hardware (700K initrd cf 2.4MB and 56K modules cf 20MB)!

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