Ubuntu 14 on Pavilion G6 no LAN

[Diluculo_DelFuego]

Hello, I have a HP Pavilion G6, that used to have windows 7 Home Basic on it and had several problems, including bad clusters on disk.
Had an Ubuntu Home DVD for 14.04, so installed it. Everything works wonderfully except networking.
Neither wired or wifi work for networking adapters, it doesn't see the hardware.
So trying to down-up the interfaces is not working. The ifconfig output shows loopback only.

 

[Öwnchef]

lspci, if it doesn't show on the PCI bus, some hardware error occured with the card, the bus or the cable.

 

[Diluculo_DelFuego]

Thanks in advance to the readers and repliers

 

[Diluculo_DelFuego]

lspci, if it doesn't show on the PCI bus, some hardware error occured with the card, the bus or the cable.

Thanks so much!! Will try it now.

 

[Diluculo_DelFuego]

lspci shows 13 unknown devices, lists the Ethernet controller which appears to be fine, but it appears that the network controller is not happy, lists unknown device. Looking for address clashes.

 

[Diluculo_DelFuego]

dmesg | grep controller - output shows Detected active multiplexing controller

dmesg | grep Ethernet - output shows Gigabit Ethernet driver loaded

dmesg | grep Network - zero output.

 

[Diluculo_DelFuego]

No obvious address clashes

 

[Diluculo_DelFuego]

Yet /etc/networks shows a bound ipv4 address. I don't recognize the address and suck at calculating the types of addresses and subnets. It's a 169.254 address which tells me it can see someone.
The nsswitch.conf shows
files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4

 

[Diluculo_DelFuego]

So might need some repairs.

 

[Diluculo_DelFuego]

Will try using /sbin/nameif to configure the lan controllers.
I guess this is good practice to try to reenter the Linux field, particularly redhat and Ubuntu. Would love to work with Solaris and HpUx in a large corporation again.

 

[KjEno186]

Is there any way you can format a USB stick with something like Mint Mate 20? Ubuntu 14.04 is quite a bit beyond the period for LTS (long term support) updates. For example, there's no web browser with current security fixes that will run on a distro that old. I've got Ubuntu 22.04 running on a HP laptop from 2012 just fine, so that might be an option if you have at least 4 GB RAM on it.

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[Diluculo_DelFuego]

Shit .. never thought of the distro version. And quite frankly, even if I kept it 9fflinr as a dev machine, I would still need to patch languages and libraries as well.

Thanks!!

 

[SkullTraill]

As others have said, if you intend to use this operating system as a daily driver (not just as a server) then you shouldn't be going for LTS.

Even if you somehow needed LTS, 14 is way, way past expiration. There is already 22 LTS, and almost every server online has at least upgraded to 18 or 20.

Best bet is to get a more up to date ISO of Ubuntu, Mint is good too, but in my experience offers no perceivable advantage to a developer/power user. Just Ubuntu with more layers.

I'm not a huge fan of Ubuntu (aside from quick spin-up VPS instances).

For desktop/personal usage, I recommend the following:

• For a stable, mature, release-based distro: Can't beat Fedora
• For a bleeding-edge rolling release distro: Arch or lightweight forks of Arch (stay away from bloated arch based distros that have been forked 20 times - like ArcoLinux)
• For lightweight, max-customizability enthusiast distro: Gentoo or Void Linux
• For set and forget simplicity and for installing on your parents laptops: OpenSUSE or Ubuntu or Mint

 

[Diluculo_DelFuego]

Right on. The more I think of it, this distro release is at least six years old, which means all tools and libraries are deprecated. So yeah, will upgrade asap. My issue is it has to be free. Solaris used to have a student education free version of everything. Since Oracle took over Sun, I'm not sure that they still do that. Fedora and SuSE are awesome.
Yep, need a new disk. Maybe a Linux magazine has a recent full release.

 

[Diluculo_DelFuego]

I do know a local teacher, I will hit him up to see if has a spare up to date OS release iso CD.

 

[SkullTraill]

I do know a local teacher, I will hit him up to see if has a spare up to date OS release iso CD.

Couldn't you just download the image and burn it to a USB drive and boot off of that? That's what I do whenever I need to install an OS on bare metal. Most computers I own don't even have CD drives at this point haha.

 

[Diluculo_DelFuego]

Could be. I have a few assorted USB drives. So depends on the amount of gb needed for it to work.

 

[KjEno186]

Mint is good too, but in my experience offers no perceivable advantage to a developer/power user. Just Ubuntu with more layers.

For me, Mint is Ubuntu without Snap packages. I prefer Flatpaks anyway! Other than that, I just want an operating system that gets outa the way and doesn't need a ton of packages updating all the time as is often the case with a rolling release distro.

 

[Öwnchef]

I am on Centos since a decade.

Solaris was great but expensive, though.

 

[Diluculo_DelFuego]

Solaris as a home edition prepared me for working with 100+ sun servers alone in a data center for an automotive design company.
Fedora and RedHat in 2000+ prepared me for several corporations.