The Blog Thing

I recently bought a new Intel D945GCLF mini-ITX board (http://www.intel.com/Products/Desktop/Motherboards/D945GCLF/D945GCLF-overview.htm) and had some problems installing Linux on it.
The problem I encountered was that the installation would cause a kernel panic (“Oops…”) early on in the process.

I’ve tested this with CentOS 5.2, and Fedora 9 and both gave the same results.

The problem seems to be the driver for the on board LAN interface. This is a Realtek 8102EL fast ethernet with PCI Express interface chip, but all the installations try to load the Realtek r8169 driver and that’s where it fails.

The solution is to (these instructions work for CentOS / RHEL, for Fedora 9 see below):

1. Download the correct driver (the r8101 is correct, this works for the r8102!) from the Intel web site (which is here at the time of this post: http://downloadcenter.intel.com/default.aspx?iid=gg_work+home_dowloads). Enter the board model in the “Search Downloads” bar and select Linux as your OS. Download the LAN driver. You’ll get r8101-1.006.00.zip (or similar). Unzip that to a USB stick/floppy/CD/whatever. You should have a directory on it that looks like r8101-1.006.00 with some files like Makefile, readme and two subdirectories.
2. Start the machine, get into the BIOS setup with F2 and disable the builtin ethernet card.
3. Boot the machine with your install CD/DVD and do the install the way you want it. Make sure you install the “development tools” (gcc, libraries, kernel headers, etc), as we need to compile our own kernel module later on.
4. Once you’ve booted the newly installed machine, log in, get to the shell command line and mount the media you’ve unzipped the driver on. In my case it was a usb stick and I did a “mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt“.
   Copy the directory with the drivers to somewhere you like with “cp -R <source> <dest>“. In my case: “cp -R /mnt/r8101-1.006.00 /usr/src/“
5. Go to the directory you’ve just copied and enter the following commands:

   1. make clean modules

   2. make install

   3. depmod -a

   4. echo "alias eth0 r8101" >> /etc/modprobe.conf

6. After this, shutdown and restart the machine, enable the builtin ethernet card in the BIOS setup and reboot. Your card should now work as normal.

For Fedora 9, the solution is to do steps 2 and 3 as mentioned above, update the kernel to the latest version and then re-enable the builtin network adapter.
I did the updating by temporary installing a supported PCI network card and updating the kernel as root:

yum update kernel*

If you can’t install a network card, you’ll have to transfer the latest kernel rpm and some dependencies via usb or CD and install these rpm’s by hand.
You’ll need:

kernel (i used 2.6.25.14-108)
iwl4965-firmware
kernel-headers
kerneloops

Good luck!