Lenovo G580 – enabling ethernet under linux

I recently bought a Lenovo G580 laptop to do my development stuff on, and while the wireless works ‘out-of-the-box’ on most linux distros, I found that the ethernet port was the one thing that wasn’t automatically detected and installed by Mint 14’s setup.

After a quick trawl on the internet I found the solution, and thought I’d share it here too for anyone else who might run into the same problem. As far as I know this works for Mint and Ubuntu and may well work for other Debian-based distros.

Disclaimer: anything you do is at your own risk, don’t blame me if your computer blows up or a dog runs off with your Gran’s false teeth.

1. Download compat-wireless-2012-02-28-p.tar.bz2 from http://linuxwireless.org/download/compat-wireless-2.6/. Ensure that it’s that exact file, anything with a later date won’t work. And yes, I’m aware that the link and filename have ‘wireless’ all over them. Trust me.
2. Open a terminal and browse to wherever you downloaded the files. In my case it was ~/Downloads.
3. Enter the following commands, in order:

   tar -xvf compat-wireless-2012-02-28-p.tar
   cd compat-wireless-2012-02-28-p
   scripts/driver-select alx
   make
   make install
   modprobe alx

4. That should be it. You’re basically building the drivers from source and installing them.

It’s not complicated, but it’s a pain in the neck if you don’t know where to turn and want a quick fix.

Credit where it’s due, I found this solution here, which in turn pointed to here.