Problem with RTL8139 on Acer Travelmate 290 LMi

[Basti.G]

Hello,

For two days the nic (a RTL 8139) of my new Acer Travelmate 290 LMi has been unable to connect to my network.
I've noticed some strange behaviour before. First I was unable to plug in the power supply when the network cable was plugged in. The result was, that the LEDs for Power and Battery started flashing and the battery refused to get loaded. At this time the nic still worked whenever I wanted it to.
Now, I didn't like that LEDs flashing: I removed power supply and battery and waited some seconds. After that everything seemed alright - I now can plug in the power supply wether I'm on my network or not.
But then, after the first reboot the green Link LED on my nic won't light anymore - and thus the network seems unreachable. Although dmesg tells me Link up when I do ifconfig eth0 <address> up it isn't. And I miss the Link down message when I unplug the cable.
This problem occurs under kernels from 2.6.4 through 2.6.8.1 under various distributions (SuSE, FC2 and Gentoo) with 8139too compiled into the kernel or as a module. Anyway it can't be a pure hardware problem since somehow Windows XP manages to get the nic up and running.
Acer offers a BIOS update (without any description what was fixed) with a version number of 1.20b. My BIOS is version 1.30. I don't want to downgrade, especially since the 1.20b files carry a timestamp of march 2004 - far in the past

Does anybody have similar problems or clues about this problem?
Thanks and regards

Sebastian

[andrewbarr]

You are probably hibernating Windows and then rebooting into Linux. Windows puts this NIC (I have a PCI card version) into some state on hibernate that the 8139too driver either can't or doesn't bring it out of. The solution is to go to Device Manager in Windows (right-click on My Computer -> Manage -> Device Manager), select your NIC from the list of hardware, right click and select Properties, then go to the Power Management tab. Uncheck everything. If you uncheck the first box at the top the rest should be disabled.

Hope this helps,
Andrew