Cfrtjryk

I've been very interested in switching over to a Linux based system lately. I've decided I'm going to dual boot, but my primary machine will be the Linux system. I found that Ubuntu 12.04 didn't have any support for this Ethernet chip, and I found some solutions but none worked. And it was awfully difficult navigating through web pages on Wifi, maybe that chip doesn't work so well either on Ubuntu.

Anyway, I'd like to know if there are any Linux distributions that already come with this needed support?

I have an MSI GT70 onc-494us

I found these threads on the Ubuntu Forums which discus the support (lack of support) for the Killer E2200 Ethernet network driver under Linux.

• BigFoot Killer e2200 not recognized


• Qualcomm Atheros Bigfoot Killer E2200 Ethernet working in linux

Buried in these threads were directions for taking an alx driver and patching it so that it would work with the E2200.

The first link contains the details of figuring out how to patch the alx driver. The second thread contains better details and also various fixes for getting the driver to work with later versions of the Linux kernel 3.2+.

General steps

1. Installed kernel 3.6 (as described here)


2. Downloaded drivers from here and apply both patches


3. Extract archive and chdir into it


4. run: sudo su
   


5. run: ./scripts/driver-select alx
   


6. run: make
   


7. run: make install
   


8. run: make unload
   


9. reboot

I would read through those threads before attempting to compile the drivers, also there were no distros mentioned in the threads that natively supported this hardware, so you'll be on your own for getting support for it, at least in the short term.

Finally on page 7 of the second thread someone had forked the compat-drivers (package that contains alx) on github and had applied the various patches to this code base. They claimed they had filed a pull request so hopefully these fixes will be making their way into the mainline at some point down the road.

In The Killer E2200 Network Platform and Linux it reads:

[...] The E2200 series is supported with Linux kernel 3.10 and higher. [...]

[...] With kernel 3.10, the E2205 port is just as fast as a standard gigabit port, and no problems have been encountered. [...]

Linux distributions use roughly the same kernel, so either any will support it (if the driver is stable and in the vanilla kernel) or there is only support through experimental or third party drivers.