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Why doesn't the Realtek RTL8101E/8102E adapter work on Lenny installer?

Asked by [ Editor ] , Edited by Gerfried Fuchs [ Editor ]

Hi, I'm trying to install Lenny on an PC that has a Realtek RTL810E/8102E network adapter. I'm using the Lenny netinst CD (5.0.6), but when it gets to the network setup, it fails to get a DHCP lease. The adapter works fine (for example booting with a Squeeze LiveCD). 

I thought that this could be a kernel issue, since the one in Lenny is quite old by now. However, I believe that this particular adapter has been around for several years, and modinfo claims that it's supported through the r8169 module (the PCI ID of the adapter is 10ec:8136).

I haven't been able to find Debian bug reports related to this. The only thing I've found so far is Ubuntu Bug #534536 (affecting karmic) which seems to describe the same problem.

Is there any way to install Debian from the network on a system that has this network adapter?

Thanks,

Alex


More information:

lspci -nn | grep -i eth

02:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller [10ec:8136] (rev 02)

Motherboard: 

Base Board Information
         Manufacturer: MSI
         Product Name: 740GTM-P21 (MS-7302)

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2 answers

2

oz123 [ Editor ]

Realtek releases their drivers under different licenses, and it could well be that although the kernel identifies it, it does not know how to operate your card.

Also, if you can get it to work with Squeeze, you can safely install squeeze, since it’s release it pretty close now, and you won’t have to upgrade later…


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helmut
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If squeeze is that stable, why is it not released yet? :-p

helmut
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May I paraphrase your answer? ;–) I do use sid on my desktop for seven years now. During that time I experienced only some minor problems. None of which rendered my system unbootable or ate my data. Therefore sid can be considered stable. Jokes aside: This gets into bike-shedding and could be discussed endlessly.

alex
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Thanks for your answer, your explanation may be the cause of the problem I’m having. Unfortunately, I need to set up some systems running KDE 3.5, and that’s why I didn’t use Squeeze in the first place.

oz123
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Here is a suggestion for solution:

  1. . Install Debian Squeeze, and when you need to choose packages, choose only installation of the Base System. That way you have a kernel which works with your NIC.

  2. Reboot after installation, edit your sources list to be changed from squeeze to lenny, and do apt-get update.

3.When step 2 is done, type “apt-get install kde”.

Some would wonder why you do it :–) but I also don’t like kde4 …

Oz

alex
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Great, that sounds like a good plan. I had never thought that it was possible to do something like that, but I think it could work. So basically I would end up with a Squeeze base system (kernel and essential packages) but everything else would be from Lenny. I’ll test it on an VM first to see how it goes. Thank you for your time and patience! :)

oz123
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@helmut Hmmm … Well, Debian Policy is to release only when all release critical bugs are closed. But fact is, that even before feature freeze Debian testing is extremely stable, because it has only packages that upstream vendors consider them selves stable. Further more, you can check release-critical bugs and see if there are some which apply to you as a desktop-or-laptop user ! I Use Squeeze for all my personal needs, and that means about 3 different laptops, and my workstation at work. For our servers though I use Lenny. Debian’s release critical bugs can be found here: http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/debian/all.html

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0

benh

I (attempted to) add support for this controller into kernel version 2.6.26-21 which went into release 5.0.4. However, I was not able to test this directly. It’s possible that I missed a necessary change.

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