Realtek RTL8101E mod loaded but no eth0
 

Up until recently I was banging my head against a very unreliable and slow when working wireless connection on my laptop. The internal card was an Atheros AR5001.

I finally gave up and got a crossover cable so I could transfer files from the desktop to the laptop.

First I had to enable the internal lan in bios. Then I ran ifconfig at the command line and no eth0 was shown.

The results of lspci -knn show a Realtek RTL8101E using kernel module r8169.

Now I could probably type in all the commands to get wireless running in my sleep. The wired thing makes no sense to me though.

If I have a kernel module running why is there no eth0?

How do I get it working?

Solved
 

Never mind I was thinking about this problem in the wrong terms. After the losing battle with the atheros wireless adapter, I thought I was faced with another battle against the Realtek wired adapter.

Actually all I needed to do was think of setting up the wired connection on both pcs. I successfully did that with wicd.

Until today I did not know wicd did wired connections. I'd been using it for wireless for years.