Toshiba Satellite R830-145 wired and wireless connections

[airper]

Hi folks,

Neither Wired and Wireless connections working.

I've just got a new Toshiba Satellite R830-145 laptop and I'm having some difficulties getting any Internet connections working so I can install 11.04 properly

Both the wired and wireless cards won't establish a connection from the iso I downloaded, 32bit version.

The wireless card is an Atheros AR9285, and registers okay as wlan0 using the ATH9K driver although lsmod lists these modules/drivers which are loaded by default

ath9k
ath9k_common
ath9k_hw
ath

I'm not sure if these are duplicate drivers which need to be blacklisted or are dependences.

iwconfig looks like driver(s) is installed okay, but it cannot associate with the router.

if I ping the loopback on 127.0.0.1 it all seems to respond okay so the card and the driver(s) seem to be working properly.

Just clicking on the wireless connection in network manager and it tries to connect, it searches, but does not actually establish the link with the router, although it identifies it correctly.

I searched here and worked my way through the Wiki troubleshooting guide on wireless, but I've not yet succeeded in establishing a connection.


So to wired

The laptop has a new Intel 82579v Ethernet controller. I know this is new and I have found the driver for it e1000e-1 from sourceforge which is a tar file.

Now this is a very basic question and I've search all over the place this evening for an answer obviously searching on the wrong thing, but how do I install a driver from a tar file?

I think all I have to do is untar the file (I assume just clicking on it will do that?)

Then is is just open a terminal, cd into the directory created above and then

sudo make
sudo install

Sounds rather too simple, but i didn't seem to be able to find a guide on this anywhere and I was not sure if a driver needed different treatment to a normal file.

Any pointers or hints on where to look, gratefully received

Thanks

[airper]

Can anyone offer any advice with this, getting rather desperate to get any Internet connection working in Ubuntu.

I know there are Linux drivers out there for these cards as the Fedora forums are saying Fedora 15 already has support, particularly for the e1000e-1, but I prefer Ubuntu to Fedora if possible.

[svast]

everything is in the provided README file:

1. Move the base driver tar file to the directory of your choice.  For
   example, use /home/username/e1000e or /usr/local/src/e1000e.

2. Untar/unzip archive:

     tar zxf e1000e-x.x.x.tar.gz

3. Change to the driver src directory:

     cd e1000e-x.x.x/src/

4. Compile the driver module:

     # make install

   The binary will be installed as:

     /lib/modules/<KERNEL VERSION>/kernel/drivers/net/e1000e/e1000e.[k]o

   The install locations listed above are the default locations.  They
   might not be correct for certain Linux distributions. 

5. Load the module using either the insmod or modprobe command:

     modprobe e1000e

     insmod e1000e

   Note that for 2.6 kernels the insmod command can be used if the full
   path to the driver module is specified.  For example:

     insmod /lib/modules/<KERNEL VERSION>/kernel/drivers/net/e1000e/e1000e.ko

   With 2.6 based kernels also make sure that older e1000e drivers are 
   removed from the kernel, before loading the new module:

     rmmod e1000e; modprobe e1000e

6. Assign an IP address to the interface by entering the following, where
   x is the interface number:

     ifconfig ethx <IP_address>

7. Verify that the interface works.  Enter the following, where <IP_address>
   is the IP address for another machine on the same subnet as the
   interface that is being tested:

     ping  <IP_address>

[svast]

By the way, I also have installed Ubuntu 11.04 on a Satellite R830 (-136 edition), and the network was working out-of-the-box as far as I can remember...

[airper]

Thanks svast,

Will try this later today. I did read up here about the R700 and noted the Internet connections worked out of the box, so it was a good part of the decision to go for the R830 almost the same machine in theory.

I also got the store to let me boot up the demo machine into Ubuntu. Network Manager, clearly recognised the wireless card as it listed all the available networks in the store, the only thing I couldn't do was connect to one of them.

So it is a bit of a pain that the final bit or the wired connection didn't want to play.

Buying a new machine (laptop) is a bit of a challenge if you want to use Ubuntu at the moment, I've had two new machines recently this one and an Acer, both have had basic problems with Internet connections.

Will try and get this working as above and many thanks for the guidance.

[svast]

I agree with you on this: it is really a challenge to choose the right laptop hardware in order to use Ubuntu.

Please let me know if you finally make it work.
Is it working with the original Win$ OS?
What are the detailed specs (cpu, ram, hdd...) of your R830-145 (did not find it)?

Best regards

[airper]

Hi svast,

The Toshiba Satellite R830 is supposed to be the same as the R700, but with Win Home as opposed to Win Pro.

And yep in Win OS everything is working okay. I normally removed Win and just install Ubuntu, it's taken me a while but I really like Linux and can now manage with it as my only operating system.

On this machine I was going to try a dual boot installation as it has a 640Gb hard drive.

The spec of the R830 is

Intel 5i processor
Intel HM65 chipset
6Gb ram (so on install I need the Internet connection to make sure pae is loaded up)
640 Gb harddrive
Atheros AR9285 wireless card
Intel 82579v Ethernet controller

If I can get the basics working I'll start a thread like they have for the R700 so everyone knows about the Ubuntu install and driver setup processes, but I thought I ought to get at least the Internet connections sorted out first.

Video seems fine, sound is fine, not sure yet about hot keys and stuff or sleep modes etc.

It's going to be fun no doubt. I noticed for the R700 series machines people are installing the latest 3.0 series kernels to overcome the lockup and cpu fan over speeding problems when on batts. I'm assuming I might have to do that for the R830 as well.

[airper]

everything is in the provided README file:

1. Move the base driver tar file to the directory of your choice.  For
   example, use /home/username/e1000e or /usr/local/src/e1000e.



6. Assign an IP address to the interface by entering the following, where
   x is the interface number:

     ifconfig ethx <IP_address>

Sorry where you say assign an IP address to the interface, is that a standard address, or can I use anything here and does it matter if the router is set up for DHCP addressing?

Thanks

[svast]

Hi svast,

The Toshiba Satellite R830 is supposed to be the same as the R700, but with Win Home as opposed to Win Pro.

And yep in Win OS everything is working okay. I normally removed Win and just install Ubuntu, it's taken me a while but I really like Linux and can now manage with it as my only operating system.

On this machine I was going to try a dual boot installation as it has a 640Gb hard drive.

The spec of the R830 is

Intel 5i processor
Intel HM65 chipset
6Gb ram (so on install I need the Internet connection to make sure pae is loaded up)
640 Gb harddrive
Atheros AR9285 wireless card
Intel 82579v Ethernet controller

If I can get the basics working I'll start a thread like they have for the R700 so everyone knows about the Ubuntu install and driver setup processes, but I thought I ought to get at least the Internet connections sorted out first.

Video seems fine, sound is fine, not sure yet about hot keys and stuff or sleep modes etc.

It's going to be fun no doubt. I noticed for the R700 series machines people are installing the latest 3.0 series kernels to overcome the lockup and cpu fan over speeding problems when on batts. I'm assuming I might have to do that for the R830 as well.

6GB RAM: I suggest you to give a try with Ubuntu 64bit, so you won't need PAE trick.

In reality there is a true difference between R700 and R830 serie in the hardware side: R700 is core i5 1rst generation (like i5-480M), R830 is holding sandy-bridge platform with new core i5 CPUs (like i5-2510M).
Also, the graphics is different because the intel GPU is included in the CPU on the R830, requiring new Intel drivers.
This has been leading to several problems in making Linux working properly on these new platform, especially when you want multiple monitors.

My own R830 motherboard just broke, so I returned it to be repaired.
I will post/participate with my tips and tricks when I receive my laptop.

[svast]

Sorry where you say assign an IP address to the interface, is that a standard address, or can I use anything here and does it matter if the router is set up for DHCP addressing?

Thanks

This is not necessary if you already have a DHCP server on your LAN.
You may just try :

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart
sudo ifconfig eth0 up

That should be enough