Enabling Ethernet Port

Ethernet support is already built into the default Kernel configuration provided by Texas Instruments. To double check if ethernet is set in the kernel configuration, look in the .config file in the Kernel root directory and check that the following is set to "y":

CONFIG_INET IP_PNP CONFIG_IP_PNP_DHCP CONFIG_NET_ETHERNET CONFIG_MII CONFIG_SMC911X

If Ethernet and networking configurations are not enabled properly, then use the menu config to enable it. To enter menu config, type "make menuconfig" in the Kernel root directory. Follow the following to enable:

Networking supportàNetworking optionsà TCP/IP networking IP: kernel level autoconfiguration IP: DHCP support

Device DriversàNetwork device supportàEthernet (10 or 100Mbit)à Generic Media Independent Interface device support SMSC LAN9115678 support

Checking the Bootargs
Once you have a proper kernel image, ethernet and TCP/IP should be operational. To get a valid DHCP add "ip=dhcp" to the u-boot bootargs environment variable, i.e.  setenv bootargs 'console=ttyS3,115200n8 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rw rootdelay=1 mem=256M ip=dhcp init=/init'

With the ip variable set in the bootargs, the kernel will use DHCP during boot-up to grab IP address from the DHCP server. Once this variable is set, the kernel will block until it detects a valid connection.

Checking the Android Properties
To get the Android browser to resolve address names, set the DNS server property. In either the ADB or COM shell, give the following command: “setprop net.dns1 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx” where xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is the IP address to your DNS server.

Note: If you are behind a proxy, then at the time this article was written we have NOT found a method to set the proxy server for the Android browser to use. We have tried using "setprop net.eth0.http-proxy hostname:port" and "setprop net.gprs.http-proxy hostname:port", but neither could get us through the proxy. Also, the option of adding an entry of (99,'http_proxy','hostname:port") to the 'system' and 'secure' tables in the /data/data/com.android.providers.settings/databases/settings.db database has also been tried, but failed.