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[SOLVED] Realtek LAN / rtl8168e-e3.fw not working

Thu Mar 23, 2017 8:31 am

This is what I did:

- boot Life-CD (8.3)
- "dpkg -i realtek-firmware..." (needed one is definitely rtl8168e-e3.fw, working in Debian!)
- install to hard disk

In the bootlog the firmware was correctly loaded and sometimes the system got an IP, but no "real" connection is established. I tried this over and over again, with and without editing ".../interfaces" and like. There's some kind of connection I think, but not really functional ... ? ... :(

Perhaps anything else is needed? Module (r8169) seems normally loaded...

Thanks for help
jotka
Last edited by jotka on Thu Mar 23, 2017 4:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Re: Realtek LAN / rtl8168e-e3.fw not working

Thu Mar 23, 2017 8:58 am

If I'm not mistaken, firmware is loaded at boot time, therefore, if it is not included in a live distro, it cannot be loaded when running live session.

If you have installed, check out which modules are being loaded, use lsmod in a terminal & see if the modules show up.
Last edited by FOSSuser on Thu Mar 23, 2017 9:03 am, edited 2 times in total.

Re: Realtek LAN / rtl8168e-e3.fw not working

Thu Mar 23, 2017 8:59 am

Perhaps I found a solution. Debian uses the r8169 module but that's known to not work well.
Better is using the r8168-dkms from non-free (not in stable...). Let's see

Re: Realtek LAN / rtl8168e-e3.fw not working

Thu Mar 23, 2017 12:36 pm

https://unixblogger.com/2016/08/11/how- ... ted-guide/

Re: Realtek LAN / rtl8168e-e3.fw not working

Thu Mar 23, 2017 3:15 pm

It's working! It's that easy... To shorten the whole thing: Because of r8168 being closed source it's not used in Debian/Devuan. The (free) r8169 is used instead, but that's not working in every case. r8168 is in testing / non-free. So here's what did the job:

- download the "r8168-dkms" deb-file directly
- boot Refracta
- install to harddisk
- boot installed system
- dpkg -i "r8168-dkms...deb" (no dependencies)
- dpkg -i "realtek-firmware...deb"
- reboot

Thanks and bye! jotka
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