A Challenge For You Linux Geeks

[thaimite]

I have recently built a new machine which on which I have installed U-bunt-u 9.10 beta and Windoze7

All is working well, EXCEPT for one small but very annoying problem.

The motherboard has a standard 10/100Mb NIC., but because I do a lot of in house data transfers I added a second 1Gbit network card which uses a very popular Realtek chipset. (This seems to be correctly detected by the Ubuntu system)

My problem is this

After applying power to the machine if I boot straight in to Ubuntu the GB Network card will not initialise and will not work. It does not even show a "connect light on the cable.

However if I first boot in to windoze the card is initialised and works fine, then I can shut down and reboot in to Ubuntu and all is well. The card works exactly as expected. It will continue to work even after reboots and shutdowns for prolonged periods until the power cord is removed or there is a power failure, when I have to go through the procedure of booting in to Windoze first to re-initialise the card.

As this machine is intended to be an unattended "headless" server all of the above is very inconvenient.

It seems to me that somehow the Ubuntu initialisation of the card is failing but being fairly new to Linux I have no idea where to look to solve this issue, although some ideas i have thought of but not yet tried are

Changing the card settings in the BIOS and disabling the onboard Network card which is no longer used.

I am even open to an automatic solution that will boot in to Windoze after power failure, then automatically shutdown and reboot in to Linux.

HELP Please

One other piece of diagnostic information.

On the initial boot in to Linux, there is a fluury of lights as the card seems to try and start, but then it gives up and turns off.

[Dontdisturb]

Typing

cat /proc/dev/net

in a terminal you should get something like this:

ubuntu@pc-ubuntu:~$ cat /proc/net/dev 
Inter-|   Receive												|  Transmit 
face |bytes	packets errs drop fifo frame compressed multicast|bytes	packets errs drop fifo colls carrier 
lo:	4755	  49	0	0	0	 0		  0		 0	 4755	  49	0	0	0	 0	   0 
 eth0:13139583  114434	0	0	0	 0		  0		37  1202611	6549	0	0	0	 0	   0 
 eth2:   12604	 137	0	0	0	 0		  0		 0	11365	 133	0	0	0	 0	   0

Now typing

ubuntu@pc-ubuntu:~$ cat /etc/network/interfaces

you should get something like this:

ubuntu@pc-ubuntu:~$ cat /etc/network/interfaces 
...  
auto eth0

Just edit the /etc/network/interfaces file and add your Gbite: auto eth2 or whatever the number is and comment the other one with a # at the beginning of the line if you don't want to use it.

You can also have both cards activated: auto eth0 eth2

Edited October 18, 2009 by Dontdisturb

[jobsworth]

I had a similar but different problem on an earlier version Of Ubuntu.

The fix was the same as you mention. Enable the LAN card in Windows and then it will work in Ubuntu.

It had something to do with power saving.

Windows would switch the LAN card off and on.

There is an option under Windows network to disable this.

I forget which one. I just tried them all.