I decided to install Scientific Linux on the computer in my lab. Partly because this distribution is called "Scientific", partly because it is compiled from Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the most prestigious Linux distribution in the world.

At first, I downloaded the Everything DVDs and burned it into my USB stick via UNetbootin. Unfortunately, it couldn't boot. Then I tried the Live CD. It did worked and I installed the SL in a few minutes. However, the network could not be connected and the NIC could not be activated. I checked the NIC type by "lspci | grep net", and I found it was Broadcom Corporation NetLink BCM57780.

Many people complain this network card. Some guys tried to download the source code of the driver from Broadcom and compiled it by themselves. I didn't want to do that, so I searched "tg3 rpm" and finally got the rpm package for SL kmod-tg3-3.122-1.el6_2.x86_64.rpm. I installed it and restarted the network even the computer, the NIC still didn't work.

Then I resorted to compiling the source code of tg3. Unfortunately, I realized that gcc was not installed -- the LiveCD didn't contain the GCC package. When I tried to manually install GCC from rpm, a series of shared library dependencies blocked me. So I have to downloaded the LiveDVD of SL, burned it again and installed the SL again. This time, the GCC was included.

Before building the tg3 driver, I installed the downloaded tg3 rpm package and searched again for the driver. Finally I found webpage How to updating driver for gigabit network card [Broadcom TG3:netXtream] on fedora core 4. and responses to eth0 no device found, NIC Broadcom tg3 drivers, kernel, DKMS. Combing the two webpages, I got to know how to make BCM57780 work in SL:

  1. Download and install kmod-tg3-3.122-1.el6_2.x86_64.rpm.
  2. Go to /lib/modules/<kernel#>/kernel/net and check if tg3.ko there. If not, try executing "locate tg3".
  3. Run command "insmod /path/to/tg3.ko".
  4. Run command "service network restart".
  5. Update /etc/.rc.local and append commands in 3 & 4 to the end. Or you must manually run commands 3&4 after reboot.

Besides, if the above still not work, you may consider appending "biosdevname=0" to the kernel line of the grub config file /etc/grub.conf.

[Update 08/09/2012]:

I am sorry that I didn't really tried if the way above modifying /etc/rc.local really work after reboot. And today I did try, but the answer was no. I struggled for another hour and finally found out the tricky tip: module tg3.ko must be removed and re-installed before restarting your network, or the Broadcom NIC still wouldn't work!

So you should append following code to your /etc/rc.local:

rmmod tg3.ko
insmod /path/to/tg3.ko
service network restart