ThinkPad T510 Ethernet Card Driver on Debian Lenny [ Edited ]

[Kays]

Hello,

I just bought my first Lenovo laptop, a Lenovo ThinkPad T510, and received it just yesterday. I partitioned the HDD and installed Debian Lenny on it. During the installation, Debian was unable to detect a network connection and throws up saying that it can't find a network connection and that if I knew the driver for it, I can select it from a long list. I was using direct Ethernet connection.

So from the list, I tried about 15 of them (just the ones I thought are possible candidates) and no success. I managed to install Debian without configuring that. I can boot into Debian, but I can't connect to the Internet via Ethernet so I can't get the wifi driver or anything. This is so weird. This is the only computer that Debian has ever complained about Ethernet drivers in my experience.

Any help, advice, suggestion is much appreciated.

Thank you in advance. =)

[buddinggeek]

You should have tried ubuntu which would have automatically fetched the proprietary drivers for you,unless you have a specific reason to use Debian,I Would suggest you go for Ubuntu or Fedora Stable

[Herik]

Hi,

yes, I wold also advice to use Ubuntu to configure it all as that works fine for me. 

Anyway, maybe this will help a bit :

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid=MIGR-48NT8D 

Cheers

[Kays]

Hello,

Thanks for the response. I don't like Ubuntu or prefer it over Debian. I managed to solve this however (despite my lack of update here). I'll list the steps for Debian Lenny ( base install) for those who still wish to stick to it.

1. Download e1000e driver from Intel's website. Unpack and install. Once set up, Ethernet will be working.

2. Download the package iwlagn, which requires a kernel upgrade. Wifi should work after a restart and boot into the new kernel.

The only problem with the new kernel is the brightness/dim controls are no longer working. The following can be set up via alias for easier controls, but they seem to require root. It's not the best way, but I hadn't messed with it much because Squeeze was going to be released soon at the time.

echo 4 > /proc/acpi/ibm/brightness

echo 5 > /proc/acpi/ibm/brightness

I'm currently not on my laptop but I believe 4 is dim and 5 is bright. Or vice-versa. Easy enough to test it yourself.

But that's about it. Everything else ran fine. Since Squeeze is finally released, I will be trying it real soon.  =)

Thanks for your efforts!

Kays

[mark4567]

 Realtek Ethernet?

 modprobe -r tg3 broadcom

 modprobe broadcom

 modprobe tg3

 ,works for me on the IdeaPad with a Realtek in it.

[Kays]

I supposed I should've ran lspci and output that information. The e1000e did work though. After running `modprobe e1000e' it was fine. Anyways, that's for Lenny.

I ran `apt-get dist-upgrade' during the weekend to upgrade to Squeeze. Everything seems to upgrade fine, except for the red trackball. I'm looking into how I can get that working.

Since I didn't do a fresh install I don't know if anyone has issues with Ethernet or wifi. They can try my approach or mark4567. I haven't tested mark4567's and I don't know if the IdeaPad uses the same hardware as the ThinkPad.

Cheers!