Alessio Treglia

r8169 module has a lot of bugs and it doesn’t work well with a large number of Realtek’s adapters, so, a few days ago, I posted a patch for the Realtek r8101 module, which supports kernel 2.6.23 but not the 2.6.24, newest kernel in Ubuntu 8.04 «Hardy Heron».

This howto could be a solution for a large number of ethernet adapters issues.

The first step is downloading the right driver (r8101 or r8168) for the adapter:

• r8168 supports RTL8111B, RTL8168B, RTL8111, RTL8168 and RTL8111C;
• r8102 supports RTL8100E, RTL8101E and RTL8102E-GR.

Don’t try to compile the module now, it will not work, we need to apply a patch in order to make it working with Hardy’s kernel

Dowload in Home dir the patch for r8168 module or that for r8101, open a terminal and type these instructions to extract the tarball (I think it’s unnecessary, but filenames and paths could change, in according with the driver version):

cd ~/
tar -xvf r8101-1.007.00.tar.bz2
cd r8101-1.007.00/src

Now apply the patch to the r8168 sources dir:

patch < ~/r8168-8.005.00.hardy.diff.txt

Or, if you need r8101 driver, type this:

patch < ~/r8101-1.007.00.hardy.diff.txt

Finally, compile and install the module:

cd ..
make clean modules
sudo make install
sudo depmod -a

To avoiding r8169’s loading at boot, create and open a new file, /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-network:

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-network

And add this line:

blacklist r8169

Finally, update the initial ramdisk:

sudo update-initramfs -u

At the next boot, your ethernet adapter will work really fine