Ethernet Controller not detected with CentOS 5.4 on Dell Latitude E6420

This is related to my earlier post on CentOS 5.4 installation on Dell Latitude E 6420.

The installation of CentOS 5.4 went smooth. Once installed I realised that my ethernet controller was not detected correctly. Having a laptop and not being connected is worthless. The output of the lspci command says it all.

------- lspci --------
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Unknown device 0104 (rev 09)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Unknown device 0101 (rev 09)
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Unknown device 1c3a (rev 04)
00:19.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Unknown device 1502 (rev 04)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation Unknown device 1c2d (rev 04)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Unknown device 1c20 (rev 04)
........
........


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Luckily, mine was a dual boot machine. I booted using the other OS(Windows 7 Professional) to find out the Ethernet controller on my machine. I had Intel 82579 Ethernet Controller and e1000e linux base driver was the one I needed. The README txt inside the tar archive had all the details. I just installed it and rebooted my machine.

Voila! I am connected to my LAN.
To check my network connection i executed 'dmesg | grep e1000e'. 

--------

[raghu@raghu-ti8105 ~]$ dmesg | grep e1000
e1000e 0000:00:19.0: Using NUMA node 0 for memory allocations
e1000e 0000:00:19.0: eth0: (PCI Express:2.5GT/s:Width x1) 5c:26:0a:6b:06:81
e1000e 0000:00:19.0: eth0: Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Connection
e1000e 0000:00:19.0: eth0: MAC: 11, PHY: 11, PBA No: 3041FF-0FF
e1000e: eth1 NIC Link is Up 100 Mbps Half Duplex, Flow Control: Rx/Tx
e1000e 0000:00:19.0: eth1: 10/100 speed: disabling TSO
[raghu@raghu-ti8105 ~]$

-------


Later after upgrading to CentOS 5.7 the 'lspci' command gave me this output.

---------
[root@raghu-ti8105 net]# lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family DRAM Controller (rev 09)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200/2nd Generation Core Processor Family PCI Express Root Port (rev 09)
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family HECI Controller #1 (rev 04)
00:19.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82579LM Gigabit Network Connection (rev 04)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced
.......
.......
---------

DELL LATITUDE E6420

I have moved to a new laptop after four and half years of my association with an HP laptop (Compaq nx6310). I have been provided with a new DELL Latitude (E6420). The machine is sleek and I have moved up in the 'eyes of the beholder'.

I had asked for a dual boot option and the administrator conceded by giving a Windows 7 Professoinal (without admin rights) with unformatted(free) 180GB space. The next thing I did was to fetch my old CentOS 5.4(Final) DVD and install it.

The installation went smooth however the trouble started after that. The machine didn't recognise the network card and most of the other things present on my mother board. Here's how I fixed it.

• Windows 7 partition had no problems in connecting to my LAN.
• I tried booting Ubuntu 11.04 using a USB drive and it worked. I could connect to the network with that. This reduced my search to a compatible network driver within CentOS.
• I got the driver details here.
• Downloading and installing as mentioned in this README fixed it.

Once connected to the network I updated my OS to the latest (CentOS 5.7).

This blog helped me move from CentOS 5.4 to 5.7.