i have just installed solaris 10 on a 60 gb hard drive. now im trying to install my nic driver but when i put in the floppy disk for the nic card it cant read it, so then i found that i have to mount the floppy drive and i tried putting in the mount command but i dont know where to mount it and if i should make up a file name for it or what? i followed the instructions carefully on how to mount a device but it just gives me "command not found" also, the light for my floppy drive just stays on, even when i take the floppy disk out. My post is fine though. then i tried putting the floppy disk back into a winxp machine to put the driver on cdrom(cause solaris sees my cdrom) and it said "you need to format this first". i said no but now i dont know how to get the data from the disk anymore cause if i reformat everything will be destroyed. so i decided to go online and get the driver from the internet. first i just burned it as a zip. then i tried doing the "gunzip filename.zip | xfa(or watever) " command and that did not work. i dont remember the error but basically it told me that i was an a**hole. then i tried unzipping it in windows and then burned the uncompressed folder on cdrom. i then put that folder in etc/dev/ and then tried the "usr/bin/something/make install" when i was in that dir. it either gives me "cannot make this file" or "unrecognized command 'make' " i did a "chmod" on all the files that i needed to and i also did the su command. i am logged in as root as well. the driver files that are in there are *.c, *.h, and a *.ko file. the nic card is an encore realtek 8139c (enl832-tx-rent). i think device name should be rl0 or rl but i cant find it anywhere in unix.

-I know i need to read more books but i just wanna get this done and i feel that im so close but i just dont have an understanding of where everything goes.

Well done for getting files onto the machine.

Did you follow the instructions for installing the driver on your system? Where did the instructions come from?

yes, i followed from the readme from the original floppy disk that the nic card came with. (i printed it out a while ago, way before i messed the disk up). i also failed to mention that there wasnt a folder for solaris in the folder that i downloaded and burned to disk. the closest one was freebsd so i used that.

No, you'll get nowhere with that.

The best I could find was...

Solaris x86 - Documents

and

Free NIC drivers for Solaris

now i burned the rf-2.4.0.tar.gz on a dvd-r from my xp machine and put it into my dvd readable drive on my unix machine. when i try to gunzip it
("gunzip -cd rf-2.4.0.tar.gz|tar xf -") it gives a bunch of the same 2 error messages "tar: rf-2.4.0:read only file system" and "tar: cannot open rf-2.4.0 no such file or directory. when i "ls -l" for the rf-2.4.0.tar.gz file the permissions are -r--r--r-- so i tried "chmod u+rwx rf-2.4.0.tar.gz" and it said "chmod: warning: cant change rf-2.4.0.tar.gz". so how can i make this file executable?

Your DVD is readonly I imagine.

Copy the gz file to a temporary local directory first.

thanks for helping me out porter. i have another problem now... I put it in a dir called "justin" below my root dir. i copied it "cp rf-2.4.0.tar.gz /justin"
and now when i try to "sh install" in the justin dir it gives me "install: install: cannot open" and i also tried "sh usr/sbin/install" and it gave me usage: install [options] file [dir ...]" so i think my syntax is a little off on this one. but i tried doing "install rf-2.4.0" and "sh install rf-2.4.0" and im just out of ideas now.