Hi!

I'm setting up a gaming box for my teenage son. He wants Arch Linux. I did the install without the graphics card, and all went well. Put in the graphics card, and now the ethernet interface doesn't initialize on startup. Completely re-installed Arch, still no networking. Removed the graphics card, networking returns.

There are no relevant-appearing error messages from dmesg. I can bring up the network interface manually, but nothing seems to get it to initialize on startup. DHCP configuration is problem-free if the graphics card isn't there. All this before I even attempted to install drivers for the card.

I'm totally stumped. Any ideas?

Thanks... 2p

Is Arch using predictable network interface naming? If so the name of your NIC may change when another card is inserted. Try running ifconfig -a to see all interfaces.

Completely reinstalled as in, reformatted the drive from scratch with the graphics card installed? That's just plain weird.

Details about the hardware might be helpful: motherboard, other graphics on board including Intel, slot on the bus the Radeon card is in vs the network card (hint) the Radeon card likes to be #1.

There might be some odd bios/UEFI setting about MAC spoofing too.

Finally, if you're reinstalling anyway, try a different distro for diagnostic reasons, or even a live disk eg Ubuntu or Mint to see if the problem is Arch specific.

On the other hand, if you can get the network up manually, you could just automate the steps with a shell file.

Or ip a. It's shorter and more modern.

I also wonder why it's called predictable if it's not. Well never mind.

Yeah I know, takes time to get used to it.

Thanks for the replies!

The fix turned out to be simple. I just had to do systemctl enable dhcpcd.service. It's still weird, though, that it happened at all.

Emerson: yes, it's using "predictable" naming. Arch no longer includes ifconfig (net-utils), but the interface name didn't change.

mostlyharmless: It all worked just fine with Ubuntu Trusty, both from the live CD and when installed. Yes, I did a complete re-partition and reinstall. With and without the card. Even the Arch live CD got network. There's only one slot that can hold a graphics card on the MB, so I assume it's slot #1. H81M-E34 motherboard, AMD Hawaii PRO graphics, Intel integrated graphics on the MB.

Anyway, it's all moot now since it was trivial to fix. Time to get more familiar with systemd, I suppose. Ugh.

Again, thanks for the quick and relevant replies.

--2p