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stragu
Asked: 2013-02-27 18:40:16 +0800 CST

What is the Ethernet driver in Ubuntu 12.10?

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I have been asked by the IT people at my work to uninstall and reinstall my Ethernet driver in order to try and fix a connection problem.

When looking in Software Centre, I find those packages when searching for the word "Ethernet":

Search results in USC

Which package do you think I should uninstall and reinstall? And will it also disable my wireless connection? (i.e. Will I be able to reinstall the driver afterwards if I end up without Internet connection?)

Edit: here is the result of lspci -nnk | grep -iA2 net :

02:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x / AR542x Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) [168c:001c] (rev 01)
    Subsystem: Askey Computer Corp. Device [144f:7131]
    Kernel driver in use: ath5k
03:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8040 PCI-E Fast Ethernet Controller [11ab:4354] (rev 13)
    Subsystem: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd Device [144d:c052]
    Kernel driver in use: sky2
12.10

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Here you go: "Kernel driver in use: sky2"

    Uninstalling and reinstalling the driver is a tricky proposition as it's included by default in the kernel, known in Ubuntu as linux-image. You could simply unload it temporarily:

    sudo modprobe -r sky2

    And then reload it:

    sudo modprobe sky2

    If you really want to reinstall it, reinstall the entire linux-image:

    sudo apt-get install --reinstall linux-image-`uname -r`

    Those tickmarks are on the left side of my US keyboard on the same key with ~.

    Then reboot.

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