[ubuntu-uk] Non-default driver

[Rowan]

Well, I'm very grateful for that explanation, Sean, I really am. I shall 
read it very carefully and digest it slowly - it has taken me two weeks 
to even boil down the question to a sufficiently succinct form to be 
answerable.

Tell me, do you think there is any good reason, in anybody's minds but 
the LinuxCertified engineers, to use a non default driver at all? Is the 
"instability" in the r8169 driver a matter of common knowledge, or just 
something they dreamed up to make life more confusing?

Rowan

Sean Miller wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 7:58 AM, Rowan <rowan.berkeley at googlemail.com> wrote:
>   
>> I don't understand instruction 2. Is it one long line? What is the >
>> doing there, and is it single spaced in between the two long strings? Or
>> did it creep in when the email was transmitted?
>>
>> sed 's/blacklist r8169/#blacklist r8169/' /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.bak >
>> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
>>     
>
> It's one line.
>
> "sed" is a command in Unix/Linux which substitutes one string for
> another.  In a shell if you do "cmd > file" it takes the output from
> the command and writes it to the file specified.
>
> So, the instructions are thus :-
>
> 1. mv /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.bak
>
> "mv" is the shell equivilant of the DOS "ren", it renames the file.
> So we take the file blacklist and rename it to blacklist.bak
>
> 2. sed 's/blacklist r8169/#blacklist r8169/'
> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.bak > /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
>
> our "sed" instruction is to replace the string "blacklist r8169" in
> the file with "#blacklist r8169" - in other words to comment out any
> lines that say that (# being the comment command), "s/string1/string2"
> being the sed command for substitution.
>
> we're then going to output the results to the file
> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist (ie. the same as the file we renamed in 1).
>
> Hope that is helpful.
>
> They could, of course, have simply given you the following
> instructions which would do the same thing...
>
> --> edit the file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and comment out using #
> any lines that say "blacklist r8169", then reboot.  Be sure to back up
> the file before you start.
>
> ...but I guess that'd be too easy, eh?
>
> Sean
>
>