results of my try.

[Karen Lewellen]

Tim,
You skipped the obvious and most likely.
that the person who installed debian on this drive left out the network 
option 
all together.

First, as I have been working with computers since 1988, I know that it is 
best to  be certain a card is not loose  before testing.  that is why 
I used 
my own  regular Ethernet cable, giving me a chance to check the card.
This machine was not shipped anywhere by anyone.
Instead, it was built by the electrical engineer friend of mine who 
maintains my  main computers.
The person who did this install  considered themselves solid in debian and 
speech, put the console structure on a hard drive complete with root and 
user passwords,   and shipped it to me here from Florida.
  i assure you 
that my computer builder here, as a former IBM employee, and a present 
one of 
motherboard manufacture amd,  knows how to configure an Ethernet card.
Lord if we can configure USB for dos printing and external drives, a bios 
is child's play.

Equally it would be almost impossible for Linux not to have a driver for 
this card,  it found everything else in the box when the drive 
was installed,  even the modem shows up.
Additionally, I  suspect the card is a name brand, so it likely starts as 
your command indicates.

You may not have noticed the comments from others about the odd nature of 
the  bash line presented.
  As I have said many many times, I have little  direct knowledge   of 
Linux.  I 
prefer the  efficiency of in person training  and installations, not 
materializing here in Toronto.
Still even I was surprised when my  associate shared the line she was 
getting, the one with my name.
Granted freebds  clearly works more efficiently then Debian, even Ubintu, 
in my personal 
experience, but that does not look like any bash line I have ever 
encountered.
As for no rush, perhaps.  The only motivation I have  for creating a ssh 
TELNET door into that box is to run a very few programs music wise that I 
cannot find yet  in  DOS.
Still if I did not consider that composition project to be critical, I 
would not have tested the Linux box for ssh TELNET whatsoever.
  Given this install of Debian  has issues, and I have not located first 
hand  debian wisdom I may just dump the   present install totally.  the 
hardware 
in this box is of too good a quality to be wasted with  a poorly 
configured structure.
If I can find an edition of AbC Notation for Dos, to go with some recent 
dos music programs, then I will just replace debian with a real, for me at 
least, operating system.
I still think trying freebds  might have been fun, but there is no compile 
that I can find of the software I am interested in running for music work 
in freebds.
If I have no other real composition options but Linux, then I will try one 
possible door.
Toronto has a 2600.org chapter.  The uniqueness might interest someone 
there, or I can dump what is here and participate with help in installing 
just enough Linux for my needs.
  Thanks for checking in,
frankly, I have serious doubts about how the install was done, but getting 
forthright information is far from forth coming on the debian main list.
I do appreciate what this person tried to do.  My own install efforts on 
yet another computer were totally disastrous, fortifying my desire for 
in person help only.
Still I am not the tinker type.  I respect that such things interest 
others, but I have businesses to run, and music to render into copyright 
ready form.
Kare


On Wed, 28 Jan 2015, Tim Chase wrote:

> On January 27, 2015, Karen Lewellen wrote:
>> I typed /sbin/ifconfig eth0 as instructed the message we got was:
>> eth0: error fetching interface information: Device not Found
>
> That's very strange.  It's almost as if it can't find the network
> card.  A couple possibilities occur to me:
>
> 1) the network card got unseated and just needs to be firmly pushed
> back into its socket (this might happen if it was a PCI/ISA card and
> it came loose during shipment).  If it's built into the motherboard
> as many are now, that's not really a consideration.  An easy way to
> test/check would just be to jiggle the location where the network
> cable goes into the PC and if it feels loose, re-seat it (or have
> someone pop the case and do it for you).
>
> 2) the network card is physically attached, but it's an unsupported
> card.  This is pretty rare as Linux tends to have excellent support
> for all manner of networking hardware from ancient to bleeding-edge.
> This may be the hardest to track down.  Saving the output from
> "lspci" might help indicate whether it's even showing up on the PCI
> bus.
>
> 3) the network card might be disabled in the BIOS.  Unfortunately, on
> most PCs, the BIOS is inaccessible, so you'd have to get some sighted
> help to determine what the magic key is upon startup that lets you
> into the BIOS configuration.  Just on the handful of computers I've
> got here, it's "escape" on one, "F2" on another, and "0" on yet
> another.  When the machine is first powered-on, it usually flashes a
> "press {some key} to enter setup" message.  Then your extra eyes
> would have to poke around for something that would read like
> "disable/enable internal NIC" and make sure that it's not disabled.
>
> 4) There's a freak possibility that the ethernet card(s) failed to
> start at "0" when numbering.  If that's the case, you can remove
> the "eth0" from the original command that I gave you to check the
> output of
>
>  /sbin/ifconfig | grep -i '^[a-z]'
>
> which should list all the known network adapters that it can see.
>
>> let me add that typing shutdown -h  also produced an error,
>
> Most systems require root privileges to shut down, so you might have
> had to use either "sudo shutdown -h", "sudo halt", or "su -l -c halt"
> to do so.  That said...
>
>> so I simply turned off the machine after restoring speakup.
>
> as discussed in the previous thread, this shouldn't harm anything.
>
> So unfortunately, diagnosing hardware (particularly BIOS) issues may
> require additional sighted assistance.  But, it sounds like there's no
> major rush.
>
> -tim
>
>
>
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