Configuring the HTPC network card

Sunday, June 08, 2008

I was able to do a lot of work this weekend on my HTPC as my nephew Calvin came over for the whole weekend. My son Garet is an only child so usually daddy is his #1 playmate on weekends but I was happy to relinquish my duties to Calvin for the weekend and spend some quality gadget time on myself.

So here is a new entry on the trials and tribulations of getting a network adapter going in Linux. I have two motivations for blogging about this stuff, the first is to help others who may be attempting to do the same thing and running into the same issues. The second, and most selfish, is that I'll have a handy set of instructions for myself should I ever need to go through the process again.

I'm finding that Linux is to Windows as Visual Basic is to C++. Visual Basic is easier and more productive then C++ but there are things that are near impossible to accomplish in it. C++ is not very productive but there is nothing you cannot do with that language. In a similar vein, Linux is not particularly productive but I have found that I have far more options under Linux to get things going then I do under Windows.

So on to the topic at hand, the HP m9150f I am putting together for an HTPC comes with a Realtek 8168 network adapter. The first time I booted the computer after installing Mythbuntu the network adapter worked fine, however in all subsequent steps I found that the device would never bind for some reason. After doing some reading I realized the card was using the 8169 driver which for some reason did not work.

Fortunately Realtek has an 8168 driver on their website that can be used instead of the 8169 driver. Also fortunately is the fact that other folks have had issues with this card and the forums list a variety of solutions. I found the instructions from the user energymomentum in this post to be the best. However there were a couple of minor issues you should be aware of in addition to what is in that post to resolve this issue.

The first issue is that Realtek has published a new version of the driver, r8168-8.006.00 instead of r8168-8.005.00. I did find that the 005 patch file that is provided in this post worked fine with the 006 release though so no issues there. The second issue is if you untar the driver source to the /usr/src folder you might have trouble building the driver even when using sudo. I found I was getting Permissionm Denied errors even with sudo, dropping to root using sudo -s fixed the issue for me.

The last issue I found was that when I restarted the computer the changes no longer worked. After looking at this bug report here I was able to resolve it by blacklisting the 8169 driver and running an additional command as follows:

sudo sh -c 'echo "blacklist r8169" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-network'
sudo update-initramfs -c -k all

So I am a happy camper to have full network access going now. The one saving grace of the m9150f is it also has built-in wireless so I was able to use the wireless connection to debug the issue with the ethernet adapter.

Posted by Gerald Nunn at 4:00 PM | Categories: Home Theater | | | Permalink