em8300/dxr3 support on Mandrake 9.1

Despite working well in Mandrake 9.0, em8300 support is broken in Mandrake 9.1. Version 0.13.0 of the driver was released in November of last year and although that was well over four months before the final release of Mandrake 9.1, it did not make it into the distribution. The main bug fixed was an incompatibility in the em8300init script with perl 5.8 which ships with Mandrake 9.1 and also Red Hat 8.

In version 0.13.0 em8300init is replaced em8300setup which is written in C and also offers some configuration options when the microcode is uploaded. There is more information about this on the em8300 homepage and also on Malcolm Lashley's Personal Page

It should be possible to use em8300setup with the Mandrake 0.12.0 modules and I have made a couple of changes to the source code to make it work with Mandrake paths. I have also created an em8300setup RPM for use with Mandrake 9.1 alongside the em8300 RPM that ships with the distribution. The files can be downloaded below:

em8300setup.c Source Code: Download
em8300setup RPM for Mandrake 9.1: Download
em8300setup SRPM for Mandrake 9.1: Download

Update: As mentioned on the em8300 homepage, you cannot specify em8300setup options whilst loading the microcode with version 0.12.0. Therefore the relevant line in my modules.conf which loads the microcode and then chooses PAL is as follows:

  post-install em8300 /usr/bin/em8300setup;
 /usr/bin/em8300setup -p