One development, which has so far not made any connectivity difference, but showed auto connectivity to be off. Got it turned on, which survives reboot, but didn't open the wired pipe. Dang!

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How did you get the ethernet link status working specifically? (Normally, with a functional NIC and driver, no additional steps are needed, unless auto-negotiation fails for some reason.)

found this:

~$ ethtool -s enp3s0 autoneg on
~$ sudo service networking restart

Ok, well it would have been good to see confirmation of link status after that, and perhaps network configuration is needed as well (as per netplan page already posted). It might be that the ethtool config needs to be added to configuration somehow for permanent effect.

Well, I managed to pull the pin on a grenade. I was following this wiki

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

and had done #2, then restarted. The power turned on (fans spun), but no video output.

This confounds me as I would not expect the change I made (enabled wake on LAN in BIOS) to brick the mobo, and hopefully there is some way to recover. I will post separately on this subject and return to this thread if and when it restarts. Please keep one eye out for a new post here.

Dell XPS 8700 Desktop i7-4790 16GB RAM dual boot Win 10 home on HDD / Ubuntu MATE 18.04.1 on SSD

OK, turned out that doing a cold power up (after pulling the power cord to clear all the volatile memory) somehow changed the boot order. By breaking the bootup with F12, was able to restore the correct boot order, and get grub to show and work.

However, I kept wondering what would happen if I took out the existing HDD and the SSD, put in a spare HDD and installed 18.04.1 on that using my USB installer, i.e., would it find ethernet connectivity. And I tried to do just that, but am now concerned whether that was a bit too experimental.

The Ubuntu live disk was not able to install on the new HDD. Lots of errors.

I suddenly realized that this exercise might have somehow royally corrupted the boot loader? I will not know until I try to replace the SSD and the HDD, unless you already know that I have, or suspect that I have. Any opinions/guidance you can share with me before I try to replace the drives will be much appreciated. If this is probable, perhaps there is a fix? Thanks.

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I think you're best advised to start a dedicated thread for this latest tangent. That way you can attract the attention of those who may be able to advise further.

Sometimes it is good to sleep on a problem. It occurred to me that there was an older version of Ubuntu (maybe 12.04 or possibly even earlier) on this 500GB HDD (not the previous 1TB HDD), anyway most likely done on a BIOS install. In yesterday's exercise, I had done a something else install and the computer was probably trying to install with UEFI and that might be the problem with this attempt at installing. So this morning, I ran it again doing a complete format and simple install. All seems to have gone well with the exception of still no wired ethernet.

So I am about to shut down, remove this older 500GB HDD and hook up the previous HDD and SDD, but before I do, and while there is only the one brand new fresh install of Ubuntu Mate 18.04.1 running at the moment, is there anything that you would suggest I test now (can only use WiFi if connectivity is desired for any tests)?

Not sure if you have seen this already:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1043...on-new-desktop

@dc.901: I had a quick look at that reference, and the OP in that thread was using the r8169 driver, with a suggestion to switch to the r8168 driver. User Odysseey1942 is already using the Realtek (r8168) driver, but 'wake-on-LAN' and/or how Windows controls this interface when shutting down does seem to be impacting here.