[Solved] blacklisting and manually loading drivers

[gojirasan]

I have a Marvell Yukon 88E8052 NIC which worked fine in earlier Linux kernels, but is now broken. The module that loads in current Linux kernels is "sky2". I would like to blacklist that because it definitely doesn't work. Then I want to load a driver called "skge". I've read how to do this in Arch and Ubuntu, but I have no idea how to do it in Porteus.

[Hamza]

Hello !

Open /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
Add blacklist your_driver_name where you need replace "your_driver_name" with kernel module name.

Cheers !

[brokenman]

load your other kernel driver using: modprobe skge (only if it is not already auto loading after blacklisting the other one.

[Hamza]

load your other kernel driver using: modprobe skge (only if it is not already auto loading after blacklisting the other one)

This should be done through /etc/rc.d/rc.local file by adding a line and end of file with your wanted kernel command.

Here is an example as brokenman has advised:

Code: Select all

modprobe skge

[gojirasan]

I'm posting this from the Porteus Live CD. I now have internet on Linux. Turned out to be kind of a hardware problem. It looks like the problem was not actually with the sky2 module but with the NIC. It has 2 ports and Port 1 doesn't seem to work. Only Port 2 works. I had been leaving both ports active in BIOS, but plugged into Port 2. I think Windows was able to handle the presence of the first port being bad, but for some reason the Linux implementation was not as robust and simply failed. The last version of Linux I used was apparently around 2.6.38. So I thought the problem was the new kernel and the sky2 driver. But I booted a 2.6.38 Peppermint OS Live CD and found that it was also using sky2. When I turned off Port 1 in BIOS all of a sudden I had internet in Porteus.

I did first try the instructions here, but it didn't work. I still can't seem get my head round these virtual file systems. It wouldn't let me save the modified rc.local file for instance probably because I was running from the Live CD. I suppose I should have mentioned that little detail in my post, but I didn't want to confuse the main issue which was learning how to blacklist and manually add modules. My boot problems were a separate issue. So if I had been running a frugal install my edits would have been saved?

Anyway, thanks for the help guys. I really like this distro. This may be the Lean 'n Mean 64 bit distro that I have been looking for.