Trouble installing driver for my NIC on Debian

[woox]

I am installing Linux (Debian) for the first time right now and I am facing a bit of an issue when it comes to network hardware driver installation. The NIC on my motherboard is a Marvel 88E1111 (computer is very old). During the installation of Debian, I got to a menu which read "No Ethernet card detected. If you know the name of the driver needed by your Ethernet card you can select it from the list", then provides me with said list of driver names. However, the only driver I could find that came close the NIC I am using was one called just "Marvel", and selecting actually didn't do anything (screen flashes blue and returns me to the same menu). So I continued by selecting the "none of the above" option, and now the new menu reads: "A driver for your hardware is not available. You may need to load drivers from removable media (...)". So I thought I should google for the drivers and see what I can find. The official site of the company that made my NIC doesn't even list my model in their drivers' list (to be expected since it is so old). Then I found this: http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/drivers/net/phy/marvell.c, but I really have no idea what to do with this code. I was expecting more of a download than the source code itself. Does anyone have any suggestions? Or is this entire process over my head? 

 

Thanks for the help!

[Neil]

Your best bet is probably to grab a pci network card that had Linux drivers built into the kernel.

Short of that. Try:

http://www.driverguide.com/driver/detail.php?driverid=658539

Extract the driver source code with:

Code:

tar xjf install-8_31.tar.bz2

Install driver as follows:

Code:

cd install-8_31

./configure

make

make install

Load driver as follows:

Code:

modprobe sk98lin

Check for ethernet adapter as follows:

Code:

ifconfig -a

If you can see it, then add "modprobe sk98lin" to your appropriate modules file.