Instructions for installing the Broadcom 570x ethernet driver for a Dell D800 under Fermi Linux 731a/73rolling with kernel linux-2.4.20-24.7 . This is the newest "official" Broadcom 570x driver, which supports the 5705M chip. The tg3 driver is the preferred driver (its in the stock kernel in 2.6) but it does not work on the 2.4 kernels with this chip. the bcm5700 driver from Broadcom does the trick. As root, do this to get it working:
  1. Move in to the kernel source area (cd /usr/src)
  2. Make a symbolic link to our kernel since the Broadcom build process expects to find the kernel source in /usr/src/linux (ln -s linux-2.4.20-24.7 linux)
  3. Make a directory for the driver to expand in to (mkdir bcm5700; cd bcm5700)
  4. Download the driver (wget ftp://linux.fnal.gov/linux/73rolling/i386/contrib/dell_d800/bcm5700-5.0.16.tar.gz)
  5. Unpack it (tar -zxvf bcm5700-5.0.16.tar.gz
  6. Make the driver (cd src; make clean; make)
  7. Try it out (insmod bcm5700.o) - you should see output in /var/log/messages indicating it works.
  8. If that worked, you'll want to install it  so it works across reboots. (make install)
  9. I re-set my network settings to use it by putting "alias eth0 bcm5700" in /etc/modules.conf, then ran "service network restart"