burninbush Posted November 4, 2016 Share Posted November 4, 2016 Hi folks. Should probably have said I have a motherboard problem. I have a fairly new Gigabyte mobo here [GA-970A-DS3P] which contains a 10/100/1gb ethernet port. This has a Realtek 8111 part, which works perfectly fine with windows7 and Slackware and Puppy and PCL distros, but distros based on recent Ubuntu distributions won't work. So at the moment that prevent my even trying a bunch of distros that fall out from that. It's not a secret that the board fails this way, on Synaptic there is a R8168 file which completely solves the problem -- it's just that without a network I can't get to it. Older versions of Mint [for example] were able to build the required kernel part from published code, but the required compilers are not on recent releases. I think the issue is like this: install software always decides the card needs R8169 code, which doesn't work. The R8168 code is not even on the install disk. I have tried some hardware cards from my junkpile [example, 3c905, used to be common but are no longer used] . None of my pci cards work. Can someone here tell me how to get past this? TIA for any help. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hedon James Posted November 5, 2016 Share Posted November 5, 2016 (edited) how are you posting on here without network functionality? can you download deb file from this link, transfer to usb and install on affected machine? http://www.ubuntuupd...base/r8168-dkms Or perhaps the Realtek site? http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?PFid=5&Level=5&Conn=4&DownTypeID=3 Or maybe even build from source? https://github.com/mtorromeo/r8168 Edited November 5, 2016 by Hedon James 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
burninbush Posted November 6, 2016 Author Share Posted November 6, 2016 how are you posting on here without network functionality? can you download deb file from this link, transfer to usb and install on affected machine? http://www.ubuntuupd...base/r8168-dkms Or perhaps the Realtek site? http://www.realtek.c...=4&DownTypeID=3 Or maybe even build from source? https://github.com/mtorromeo/r8168 Hi, thanks for the reply. I haven't forgotten about this, the usb method almost seemed to work, maybe it did work, but I still can't connect to the network after what I have done so far. Tried it with a Mint 18-kde disk from a live boot; seemed like it worked, but still zero bytes sent or received. At that point I did an install of the distro and repeated it with both latest and earlier versions; seems like it worked, but still have nothing sent or received. Rebooted the machine a couple times with nothing new. I see that after the dkms install it has put a line into the /etc/modprobe.d file to blacklist the r8169 file [and it's not there in #lsusb], but I still don't see the bootup using the r8168 module as I have seen on previous uses of that file. The file from Realtek is what worked before -- I'll try with the latest version. Had trouble with it on the latest revs because of the compiler versions. Weirdly, Slack and Puppy still load a module called 'r8169' that works perfectly. What I hoped for here was someone telling me of a plugin card that was nearly universal? I see a few available at newegg, but of offbrands that might also not be recognized. Have pci sockets and a couple PCI-E sockets. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
burninbush Posted November 7, 2016 Author Share Posted November 7, 2016 Ahhh, success at last. The file from the Realtek site did the job, while the previous version that I had tried didn't. May open the door for future installs. Thanks, have a virtual martini on me. One of these days I'll buy some mobo that isn't on the sale list. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hedon James Posted November 8, 2016 Share Posted November 8, 2016 Ahhh, success at last. The file from the Realtek site did the job, while the previous version that I had tried didn't. May open the door for future installs. Thanks, have a virtual martini on me. One of these days I'll buy some mobo that isn't on the sale list. Awesome! glad you sorted it out! I'm more of a blue-collar beer man than a martini guy, but it'd be rude of me not to say "thanks" and down it...bottoms up! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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