eth0 device down

[Bas Roufs]

Dear George

>>..... the internet connection device 'eth0' is still 'down' ....

> Imho some modern laptops have two version of BIOS, one for Win XP
> one for Vista. Try a flash the laptop with the BIOS for Win XP (if exist),
> maybe this help you.

The laptop I am talking about is a 'Medion 5400', produced in 2002.
Other important specs: 250 MB DDR RAM, 40 GB HD, Pentium 4 Processor
2,5 GHZ, 4 x USB 2, Firewire, Bluetooth, PCMCIA.  The BIOS of that
machine mentions only two operating systems: DOS and Windows XP - the
2 original OS of the laptop. The HD was simply not accessible any more
with Windows - the only way to recover it was to install some Linux
distro on it and to reformat the whole disk by doing so. But I did not
yet find any way to change the BIOS in such a way that it takes the
new OS (Kubuntu 8.10) into account. Because of some advise at another
Linux forum, I switched the OS mentioned in the BIOS to 'DOS' before
installing Kubuntu. May be this has helped me to install Kubuntu 8.10,
but so far not to establish an internet connection.
Today, I changed something in the file etc/ I changed the OS
indication in the BIOS back to 'Windows XP'. Additionally I changed
some instructions in the file "/etc/network/interfaces". The
combination of both measures resulted so far in an 'unmanaged' status
of eth0, instead of 'down'. But the active connection still is not
available.

> Are you sure that the NIC is enabled in BIOS ?

Can you briefly explain what 'NIC' means in this context and how I can
find it in the BIOS menu?


> Or please specify the  precise type of your laptop.

See above.

Respectfully yours,

Bas.
-- 
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Bas G. Roufs M.A.
Van 't Hoffstraat 1
NL-3514 VT  Utrecht
M. +31.6.446.835.10
T. +31.30.785.20.40
BasRoufs at gmail.com
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