Hello folks,

Amazingly, I have been unable to find a single Linux distro that works with my Packard Bell laptop's Ethernet controller. Someone suggested that I try AntiX, so I burned the iso and booted the Live CD, but still, no luck. When I plugged in the ethernet cable, it was not recognised.

Detailed description of the problem posted
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I have tried the suggested boot options for this bug on Ubuntu, to no avail. Perhaps someone here could help? Please bear in mind when replying that my understanding of such things is fairly basic.

Thanks in advance to anyone that replies

A.

Try, as root in a terminal... Post any errors and/or output. I believe via is the driver for that chip. If it works you can set it to load at boot easily.

Also, if you could post the output of lspci. It might be helpful.

Ok, so I finally installed antiX. Went into x-terminal-emulator. Typed in 'modprobe via'. This had no effect. Then typed in 'lspci', which gave me a list of information about the hardware, VIA Technologies and AMD. I would post it here but still no internet access and I don't know how to access my external hard drive...

Any further ideas?

Just reminding that I believe you must be root for the modprobe command.
Either type 'su' and then the password when asked in a normal terminal or open the root terminal directly (used to be in antiX 8.2 under Applications>Applications>Terminal emulators>Terminal as root).

I don't have an external drive but I believe that PCManfm (the 'Home' icon in the toolbar in antiX 8.2) should show it if it's connected. Also there's a tool for mounting devices in Control Center > Disks tab.

If you can't realy get it to work then I thought of you trying some distro with an older kernel. I don't know if it makes any difference but maybe...
There are Puppy Linuxes with older kernels, there's an Absolute Linux with a 2.4 kernel (quite old - but Absolute isn't a live-cd so one has to install to try) and there must be quite a few others too, specially those which aren't developed anymore.

Hello

When I entered 'modprobe', I was as root.

Mounting drive doesn't seem to work either!!!!

Cosmic joke or I don't know...

Now trying downloading older Puppy Linux.

Thanks for your help.