I have almost finished building the system I am going to use as a MythTV Frontend, but in the meantime I have decided to put the system together and make a VM server to learn RedHat related things a little better. First thing I did was try to install CentOS from a DVD I had lying around, but the DVD was bad so I burned another. The second DVD failed the media check so I decided to try a network install. Of course, my motherboard does not have a NIC with drivers built into the net install disk, so I then installed successfully from a USB stick using the net install disk and then pointing to the ISO on the USB drive.
I figured once it was installed there would be a driver for the NIC and I would be good to go, however the first thing that popped up after initial login was that I would not receive system updates because I am not connected to the net.
With a little digging in the Hardware Browser, I found that I had a Marvell NIC so I went searching for other people having problems with it. I found Linux drivers on the Marvell site and downloaded them to my laptop and put them on the USB drive. When I ran the install script I realized that I was going to be in for some fun resolving dependencies. Once I thought I had all the dependencies met, I tried again but it still failed to install. With a little more digging on the ‘net, I found a forum post telling someone to just try loading the sk98lin module which should be included. I tried that but the module was not found.
At this point I had already messed with several things on what I wanted to be a clean installation so I decided to start over since I had not made any progress so far. While I waited for the install to finish, I found another post indicating that someone had build a kmod driver install for the sk98lin that would keep things current even after a kernel upgrade. Once the OS was installed again, I transferred that rpm to my new system, installed it and got my network up and running right away.
Downloaded the rpm from here:
http://centos.toracat.org/ajb/CentOS-5/sk98lin/
Forum post that led me there:
http://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=17422