Blacklisting a driver

For new computers, there can be a lot of tinkering involved. Ever since I bought a new Asus desktop computer, I've been doing a lot of that - and it's been great! If only the building process took a little bit longer than 25mins :(...

Generally, I've found Ubuntu Linux great for computers. Both of my laptops have worked well - after a clean installation of Ubuntu, all my hardware is usually detected correctly. It's quite pleasant. When clean installing Windoze on the other hand - I have to hunt around the web and download the exact driver for the exact model hardware. But I won't go there.

This will be a quick blog about the Realtek LAN card on my new computer (see specs below). The problem: the driver loaded by Ubuntu, r8169, appears to be faulty once the clean installation is complete and I upgrade all necessary packages. Solution: install the driver from the Realtek website, r8168, restart /etc/init.d/networking and you should be fine.

Desktop specs:
Motherboard: ASUS M5A88-M
Realtek Card (on-board): 8111E/8168B

But, Ubuntu tries to be clever (and I enjoy it when it does :D) and resets the driver to r8169 when you restart the computer. So one solution put to me was to blacklist the r8169 and set the r8168 as the default (NB: my terminology is incorrect, r8168 may not be the correct name for the 'driver'). praseodym from UbuntuForums gave me this suggestion, and the method for implementation is at this UF thread.

Alternatively, I came across another thread which appears to be a duplicate of my problem - although worded differently. The suggestion here is to upgrade the kernel to 2.6.39 and the problem should go away.

Seeing as my system is running and has a continuous connection...I might try that another time.

Why fix it if it ain't broke?

Ciao!

Update - 28 Nov 2011:
There was an update just the other day of a few hundred meg, after which I found that I was having trouble with my connection. What I found was that the 'new' driver had been reinstalled and thus started giving me the up/down problem again. Had to back track a bit because I had forgotten just how I installed it last time.

The Realtek driver download was fine, but because I'm running kernel version 3.0, I suspect that the autorun.sh file was unable to execute properly. Did a quick search and found this website with a run down for those not on 2.4x or 2.6x linux systems.

Connection is working now. :D!