My RTL-8139 based NIC card broke down today ! It broke down, just after one day I finished screenshoting my Fedora Core 4 Desktop for Internet Connection Sharing Guide.
The interesting part is, the RTL-8139 managed to bring down my Fedora Core 4 while spiralling down to it’s demise. I get a screenful of unexplained error message during the boot-up process, not knowing what when wrong at first time.
Luckily i know a trick or two, i boot up my trusty home-brew KrazhBoX just to found out that an error has occured while the Linux kernel was initializing a PCI card. Which later turns out to be RTL-8139 Ethernet Card. I found this out by doing “cat /proc/pci” in my KrazhBoX.
So to counter the problem, I had to replace my Network card with a new one and reconfigure the Fedora Core 4 distro.
Reminds me to speed up my update on my home-brew KrazhBoX rescue Linux project to use 2.6.12 kernel.
RTL-8139 is the common chip used in PCI LAN card in Malaysia. If you bought a generic PCI Ethernet card, it’s most probably ship with RTL-8139 chip.