Ubuntu Wired Networking Woes? Read This Closely

It’s enough to make you want to scream, having connectivity issues with your favorite Linux distro. And frankly why most people are best off with a Mac Mini, as it sometimes means getting your hands dirty. Well, being the determined geek that I am, I opted to get something resolved that has been bugging me for a long time - the wired connection ceasing to work after Ubuntu Edgy. Once I booted into Gutsy, I found a new world of workable means to getting a basic level of wireless standards going, yet it was at a cost of losing my wired connection.

After running

lshw -C network

I was able to tell without any question in my mind that my network card was the following.

VT6102 [Rhine II] and it has been assigned to the “via_rhine” module/driver.

In other words, it is a VIA NIC. But no matter how much tweaking I tried, nothing would give. Then I happened upon this thread. Cutting to the chase, here is the part you care about: you need to blacklist acpi=noirq. This is what I did; again, verifying that I had indeed, been using a VT6102 [Rhine II] NIC.

gksudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

Now you will be scrolling all the way to the very bottom, look for:

title Ubuntu 7.10, kernel 2.6.22-14-generic

root (hd0,0)

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22-14-generic root=UUID=a87de7c0-5109-4808-87e6-2676e4a0e894 ro quiet splash

initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.22-14-generic

quiet

Now obviously, some of this stuff is going to be different as this is not even my own kernel version. It’s an example. But look closely at this line:

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22-14-generic root=UUID=a87de7c0-5109-4808-87e6-2676e4a0e894 ro acpi=noirq quiet splash

Do you see where I slid in the acpi=noirq ? Great. Just remember that this is case sensitive and it must have spaces as you see here. If you are worried, post yours here and I will edit it for you, time allowing. If you have a VT6102 NIC, this is the fix you have been searching for. Tested working with Wicd using eth0 (that is zero, not O) as the device. Just remember for best hassle free Wicd usage, set your preferences to automatically reconnect at connection loss.

Do you have an Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Simply Mepis, Linspire/Freespire or PCLinuxOS related question? Perhaps you are just burnt out on writing on the walls with crayons? Whatever the comments may be, drop me a line, and you too can “Just Ask Matt”- Linux Edition!

[tags]Linux, Linux notebooks, Linux wireless, Linux networking[/tags]