Ok thanks, I will check it out on the laptop.
One thing that comes to my mind right now is that won't work, as my LAN has me accessing net through a HTTP proxy.

Although can be used to chck DNS.

Hi!

Try to add the line

to your /etc/lilo.conf file (and run /sbin/lilo).
I had also problems with disabled IRQ's (by the acpi system I think) and that prevented the NIC (Realtek 8169 on an Acer Aspire 1524) from working.

Good luck!

phase9 where were you for so many days?
just putting the "pci=noacpi" did it. Now it has started working. But could you tell me what was the reason for the problem? And how did appending that line solve it?

I stumbled by sheer luck over this post and since I had a similar problem with my laptop, I just tried to help...

The exact answer I don't know. In my case the NIC was working (got its IP adress from the router) until the acpi daemon was loaded by the start up scripts. Then IRQ 11 (in my case) was disabled (by the acpi daemon I think) and the NIC was down.
Maybe your question is answered with the below description of the boot promt parameters:

pci=noacpi

Do not use ACPI for IRQ routing or for PCI scanning.

pci=noirq

Don't route interrupts.

Look at the kernel dokumentation in /usr/src/linux-<version>/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt and /usr/src/linux-<version>/Documentation/x86_64/boot-options.txt for more details and also have a look at: http://www.columbia.edu/~ariel/acpi/acpi_howto.html.

I'm glad I could help, phase9

Wow, I missed out on a lot.

Glad you got it working, but the fact that you have IRQ problems could be an indication of two devices trying to use the same IRQ. I have had this happen, and you can usually fix it in the BIOS.

Glad it is fixed.

Cheers.

<<Samoth>>