Ubuntu and the IBM x60s Network Interface

Hi,

today I tried to do some online banking at www.sparkasse-zwickau.de. To my suprise, I took a very long time till the welcome page was loaded.

I checked this again with another browser: same problem. Than I tried a host outside the university… wow, it goes very fast. Hmm, and another host inside? Also fast. So I’d check the installed windows and it also worked perfectly.

I googled a bit and found that the problem is my network interface which is handled by the e1000 driver.

Some people in the ubuntu forums mentioned that the new e1000e could help.

So I got it from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=42302 (Version 0.2.9.5) and compiled it. Yes! It works. Its a big improvement although my feeling tells me, that the felt speed under windows is higher. But at the moment it’s enough to use the banking site without getting kicked by the time limit.

After compiling and testing it, here are the steps to get it into the system and replace the old e1000 & e1000e (you’ll have to do this after each kernel update):

rm /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/net/e1000/e1000.ko
rm /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/net/e1000e/e1000e.ko
cp e1000e.ko /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/net/e1000e/
depmod
update-initramfs -u

Reboot & done :-)

Bye, Sven