Ethernet-Howto and Networking-Howto, etc...

Hi to everyone !

I am having trouble having a Broadcom 5700 Ethernet card reckognized by my
System: RedHat 7.2 with an updated kernel (2.4.20-21). With the original
kernel (2.4.7-10), the card was not being reckognized at all, and the
dowloaded drivers wouldn't even compile all right.

With the new kernel, bcm5700 did compile all right. 'Insmod bcm5700' seems
to work all right. However, I can't make any useful purpose of what I get.
If I type 'ifconfig eth0 137.121.26.63 netmask 255.255.255.0 up' and then:
'ping 137.121.26.63', I get a ping result, every second or so. However, I
can't connect to the local intranet of the Company or anything else. Using
GNOME, the configuration tools tells me that my ethernet card is not being
initialized. It is supposed to be connected to IRQ 20, while the GNOME
Ethernet tool does not allow any IRQ higher than 15. However, the system
has worked once, one time only amongst a countless number of trials. Once,
I had done something which I can't remember very accurately: I had
uninstalled this and that, and re-installed part of it... and then, after
a shutdown and reboot, Linux did reckognized a new hardware, as usually
does MSWIN. Then I replied to a few questions, and the system was able to
connect to the local network... not to Internet though (may be my DNS was
not correctly set then). However, this no longer works, and I don't know
what to do. I have tried to download and read a Ethernet Howto as well as
a Network Howto, but the versions I got dated back to 1998 and referred to
kernels up to 2.2... The files and paths are not the same in my distro,
and most likely others things have changed too.

Could someone give me a link where I could find up-to-date howtos, or,
better yet, could someone tell me of his/her experience in installing and
testing ethernet cards on a system like mine ?

Thanks in advance for any input.


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Bernard DEBREIL