If you read my previous article about r8169 module but it wasn’t the best solution for your Realtek ethernet adapter, now it’s the time to be happy!

Realtek has released new version of r81* modules and now we’ll proceed to compile and install the right module we need, but please note that I have a RTL8101E PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller, so I tested this procedure on Ubuntu 8.04 «Hardy Heron» only with r8101 module.

We need to install build-essential and kernel headers to compile the sources:

sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r`

Now download in Home dir the driver (r8101 or r8168) and unzip it:

tar xvf downloaded_archive.tar.bz2
cd downloaded_archive

To compile and install the module type:

sudo -E make clean modules
sudo make install
sudo depmod -a

In order to avoid that r8169 will be loaded at the boot time, we need to edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-network (it could be necessary to create it) and add this line:

blacklist r8169

Finally, update the initial ramdisk typing this:

sudo update-initramfs -u

You can see that this way doesn’t need any patch to get a working module, this update should be the right solution for a several number of issues which users reported me (hardware incompatibilities, system freezes…). In case of problems, please leave a comment, I’ll reply soon.

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