I have a dual boot laptop that I am trying to get a good Linux distro installed onto it. For an interenet connection, I use a cable modem attached through the integrated RTL-8139 ethernet card. Under Windows XP, the internet connection works just fine. Under Fedora Core 3, the internet connection also worked just fine. But recently I decided to give a different distro a try. I tried the Debian-based Ubuntu distro. However, I couldn't even get it fully installed because the ethernet connection (which is needed to download packages) would not stay working long enough to get everything downloaded. I gave Debian itself a try from a net install CD and managed to get everything installed before the connection stopped working. But, once everything was installed, I was still left without a reliable ethernet connection so I figured I would give Mandrake a try since it isn't Debian-based. I installed it but, once again, the ethernet connection won't work for long before stopping. I tried "ifdown eth0" then "ifup eth0" and it didn't work (not that I want to do that every 5 minutes anyway.) The connection still works when I boot into Windows XP so I know it's not a hardware problem. Does anyone know what is going wrong and how to fix it? I would love to install Ubuntu again if I could get my ethernet to work long enough to download the packages.

-Brandon

Not sure but it sounds like you use dhcp and your cable modem is not renewing the lease,see if there is a way to increase the lease time or have it automatically renew it.On mine I can access the configuration page through a browser,or if some software was installed on windows see if you can change it there.Just a guess,good luck look in /etc/resolv.conf should have the address of your modem

Hmm... that's sounds like a pretty good guess but unfortunately I don't have any way to change that. I found the address for the SurfBoard SB5120 but all it does is give information; there are no options to change. I checked the software CD that came with it and it doesn't look like there is any software to configure the cable modem hardware - just drivers and manuals. Is there an option in Linux to automatically renew the lease?

Also, while I'm writing, would it really be likely that the cable modem lease would expire so quickly? I thought lease lengths were usually pretty long (a few days, not a few minutes.)

-Brandon

Power cycle the modem.

I tried. It doesn't do anything but even if it did, it wouldn't be practical to do so every time I use the computer.