Long long ago, I installed Ubuntu 10.04 as my first Linux Distro, due to the problems of networking, I used it only few times. The suck problem is that when you copy large files or did some other things as normal, the network is down! The only solution is to restart your computer! I asked bigeagle for solving this weird issue. He found it was the ethernet card driver that caused this weird issue, and you can find lots of problems with the key words searching “r8101 r8169 issue”.

After moving from Ubuntu to ArchLinux, the weird issue exists. Now I decided to lock the kernel version insdead of compiling the driver again and again when the linux kernel upgrade. Just put linux linux-headers linux-api-headers in the Ignorepkg of /etc/pacman.conf.

From the command lsmod |grep r8 you will see the r8169 built-in driver for Realtek ethernet card. From the command lspci |grep Ethernet I got my Ethernet controller was RTL8101E/RTL8102E rather than the built-in r8169 driver. Within the AUR, you can find a package named r8101, but it may not work with the kernel 3.8 or newer. You can find the r8101 driver source code in their official site. Now the version is 1.024.00, which will work on kernel 3.8 or older. In order to compile on kernel 3.10 or higher, you need a patch for its source code :)

After some Googling, I found a r8101 patch for kernel 3.10 in this thread-SOLVED Ubuntu 13.10 - RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express Fast Ethernet does not work. Thanks to Gujume3333! I added it to my github repo archlinux4fun. Change into the r8101-1.024.00 folder and excute the command sudo ./autorun.sh. If you want to compile it on kernel 3.12 or newer, you can write patch based on the r8168 - Realtek r8168 linux driver.

The certein kernel version you can find on http://mirror.iprimus.com.au.