Debian 3.0 vs. Dell GX260

[Gary Woodman]

I'm having difficulty installing woody on a new Dell GX260, using the
floppy  set. Result is the same with the standard or idepci set; I
haven't tried compact yet.

I plan to do a base install from floppy, then the rest over the net.
This turned into a hurdle when I found the Ethernet was not activated
(no eth0).

I can see two messages at bootup:
3c59x.c 18Feb01 Donald Becker and others [...]
3c59x.c:v0.99V 1/28/2002 Donald Becker [...]
...but no commentary anout IRQs used, buffers allocated, or other stuff
you might expect a driver to say when it starts up. According to Dell's
Web site, the GX260 has a 3C905C-TXM, which seems to be covered by
3c59x.o ('3c590/3c900 series (592/595/597) Vortex/Boomerang').

What this signifies is lost on me; surely this driver would be linked
in the kernel, and activated only once, not twice. But it is not
activated at all; there is no eth0, ifconfig says 'no such device', and
'network' is not on the list in the 'Set Installation Medium' screen.

I did try loading both the 3C59x modules, the standard one and the
scyld one, but they both say 'Device or resource busy', presumably
because at least one driver loads with the kernel.

Other than trying the 'compact' floppies (and, beyond that, a CD set),
I'm out of ideas. Is there anyone with Debian 3.0 on a GX260? Does
anyone have any suggestions?

Gary

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New DSL Internet Access from SBC & Yahoo!
http://sbc.yahoo.com