On Sun, 2007-08-19 at 18:02 +0100, CDW (Linux) wrote:
I watched the light on the back of the LAN card and as XP was rebooting, the green LED illuminated. At no time does it do so in Linux.
The link light (if it is a link light but if there is only 1 this is usually the case) operates at the very lowest level, in fact in many cases it will work without an OS being loaded. Until you get that to come on in linux there isn't much point playing with the IP configuration.
Out of interest at the router end do you get a link light for the port the machine is plugged into ?
I'd suggest that as rare as it is nowadays, you have a network card that has dubious support in Linux or there is some miss-configuration at the interface level.
Do you know what card (or chipset) it is.
You may as well get this from Linux with the lspci command Then while you are there run the following and have a look at the output
sudo mii-tool
It's possible that the linux driver has miss-negotiated the link speed (everything defaults to auto nowadays, but with certain combinations of cards, cables and hubs/switches/routers you can get a problem)
You could also try forcing the interface down to the lowest level.
sudo mii-tool --force=10baseT-HD
and to save another boot grep dmesg for things like "thernet" "link" etc and see if there are any relevant error messages.
dmesg | grep "thernet"
(most likely it is Ethernet and not ethernet but by leaving off the E we capture both)