The problem appears on a laptop MSI VR610X having installed both OpenSuse 11.0 and Vista 64. After updating the ethernet driver on Windows Vista with the latest realtek one, the network card stopped working on Opensuse (it cannot be set up with ifup apparently because of a duplicate ip). It works on the vista so I am sure that the hardware and the cable are ok. ifconfig eth0 gives zeros for the hardware address(MAC) of the card, but excluding that it seems that the card is recognized. ifup eth0 -o debug when checkduplicateip is yes gives that it cannot assigns the IP to this adapter because it is already in use. Perhaps it is interesting that vista was fooled that an old adapter was removed and a new one inserted after the driver update.

Is it possible that vista shuts down the NIC and Opensuse cannot wake it? I tried turning off all the power management options in the driver options under vista but with no success.

Have you encountered such a problem?

The new Vista driver for you,re NIC can only effected opensuse when it is permanent load in the NIC or loaded when you
start up the computer.
Oke I used XP and Opensuse XP has a driver for my NIC so do opensuse both are on the same drive on the same NIC
If you use yast>hardware>hardware information what did it tells you about you,re NIC

Yast accepts all configurations and saves them without any error whatsoever. I have previously found that sometimes Yast configures NICs correctly if I use ifup instead of KNetworkManager as an option in it so I am using ifup traditional method there.

nevermind...

But did find it in you,re hardware information as a fully recognized
NIC ?
And correct configured one.

Yast recognizes the NIC and in the information section writes correctly the ip and mask configuration. There is no detail about the hardware address which ifconfig eth0 says that is only zeros. After saving the configuration, the NIC is not working.

I fixed the problem by downloading the linux driver for my NIC(RTL8101E) from Realtek and compiling it:

http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/...&GetDown=false

There are very nice instructions on how to do that in the archive.

For instructions about how to load the driver at start up in OpenSuse go to:

http://en.opensuse.org/Kernel_module_configuration

It seemed that the problems was that:

http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Realtek_8169_driver_problem

but it didn't worked for me. Perhaps the above solution is applicable to Windows XP or to an older driver of realtek for windows. In my case the MAC address was just zeroes and I didn't find anything similar online. Also ethtools eth0 gave wake-on: d no matter what was set as an option for shutdown wake on lan in vista.

Thanks for your replies.