Ethernet not working, a weird one!

[Joseph C. Lininger]

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> I found  another such card and installed it. No joy. Even though the
> kernel driver is  installed, the system refuses to recognize the
> card. It is listed in the  output of lspci, though.

My guess is that you've had your ethernet interface assigned a different
name such as eth1 instead of eth0. That's done by MAC address, and if
you put a new card in that would happen. You can force it to receive
eth0 again by deleting the file
/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules. Then reboot and udev will
recreate that file, this time with your new card as eth0. If you have
definitions in that file you don't want to remove, then just find eth0
or what ever your card used to be and remove that definition. If you
wanna be absolutely sure you'll get the naming to go as expected though,
I recommend just removing the file and allowing it to be regenerated by
udev.

>     If I end up having to rebuild from scratch, what is a currently good  distro
> for console only, no GUI Linux that supports Speakup? If I were  rebuilding anyway,
> I would strongly consider switching from Gentoo to an  easier to maintain distro.

I have to disagree with you about ease of maintaining a gentoo system.
You have to do a couple extra steps to get it set up, but over all the
install is actually easier than most distro installs I know about. And
once you've done it, the system is just as easy to maintain in my
opinion as a Fedora, Debian, or other system. If you're having
particular maintaining problems with it, talk to me privately and maybe
I can point you to some resources to help you out.
Joe
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