Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

September 5, 2011

Getting RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller to work in Debian 6

Filed under: Knowledgebase,Linux/Unix Related,Tech Related,Tutorials — Suramya @ 11:28 PM

Once I got Debian 6 installed on my server I needed to connect it to the internet to download updates etc, however my network card wasn’t being detected correctly so I had to perform the following steps to get it to work correctly:

  • Download the latest Linux drivers for the RTL8111 Chipset from the Realtek site on a computer that can connect to the Internet.
  • Copy the file over to your new system via USB or smoke signals
  • Login as root to the server
  • Identify the kernel version that you are running, using the following command:
  • uname -a

    It will give you a result like the following:

    Linux StarKnight 2.6.30-2-686 #1 SMP Sat Aug 27 16:41:03 UTC 2011 i686 GNU/Linux

    Now you need to install the kernel source code for this version on the server. First we need to find the package name of the kernel source code, we do that by running the following command:

    apt-cache search linux |grep header |grep 2.6 

    If you have a 2.4.x kernel, replace grep 2.6 with grep 2.4. Once you have the package name install it using the following command as root:

    apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.30-2-686

    Make sure you replace linux-headers-2.6.30-2-686 with the package name you got.

    Once we have the kernel source installed we can go ahead and install the driver using the following commands:

    tar -jxvf r8168-8.025.00.tar.bz
    cd r8168-8.025.00
    ./autorun.sh 
    

    This will compile the drive and install it. I didn’t get any errors when I ran it, but if you do get errors try searching for the error message on Google, it usually provides a solution.

    After I installed the driver I tried initializing my network but kept getting the following error message:

    StarKnight:~# ifdown eth0
    ifdown: interface eth0 not configured
    StarKnight:~# ifup eth0
    Ignoring unknown interface eth0=eth0.
    

    Fixing it was fairly simple though, all I had to do was edit the /etc/network/interfaces file and add the following lines to it (This assumes you are using DHCP):

    auto eth0
    iface eth0 inet dhcp
    

    Once you add the lines, you can try starting the network again using the command:

    ifup eth0

    If all went well, you will be assigned an IP address and will now be able to successfully browse the net.

    Hope this helped.

    – Suramya

    September 4, 2011

    Upgrading my Desktop Hardware & Software

    Filed under: My Life,Website Updates — Suramya @ 2:46 PM

    Hey Everyone,

    I am back. Yes, I was missing for almost a year. No, I won’t make excuses for why that happened. Moving on…

    I have been having issues with my primary desktop for the past few months now, to the point where I was mainly using my GalaxyTab for most of my browsing/watching movies etc at home. It kept telling me that my Hard drive died so I decided to spend some time reinstalling Linux on a new drive. After I finished backing things up the system suddenly decided that none of my disks existed anymore and wouldn’t even detect them during boot-up. 🙁 So I connected the drives to an external case and plugged them into my laptop and they worked fine. This is when I decided that the problem had to be with the motherboard (as I had changed everything else: SATA cables, Hard drives etc)

    So I went out and bought an AMD Phenom II x6 1055T processor and ASUS M4A88T-M Motherboard to put it in. Got everything assembled and then realized that the new board uses DDR3 RAM while my previous one had DDR2 RAM so had to go buy a 4GB DDR3 RAM chip. Finally got everything working and am now a proud owner of a working desktop. Had some issue with the Network card but was easily resolved. Will document the steps on the wiki later.

    I have installed Debian 6.0 on the new system and then upgraded it to Debian Unstable (sid). The process is not as straight forward as usual and if you are not familiar with Linux its easy to get stuck. I hit a couple of snags that required me to search online for fixes and yes I will be documenting those as well in my next post. In the end all worked out and the server is stable and works without issues. Might try to overclock the CPU later to see how that goes, lets see.

    Lastly, I upgraded wordpress on suramya.com to the latest version which unfortunately broke the theme I was using so the blog has a different layout right now than normal. I will be fixing this over the next few days.

    Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

    – Suramya

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