Do a quick lspci. Now do you see: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 02) for your Ethernet controller?

If so and your network connection information is reporting that your speed is 100 Mb/s rather than 1000 Mb/s, then you MIGHT be using the r8619 driver rather than the CORRECT r8168!

This is what I experienced when I had recently hooked my network up at home. I bought a ReadyNas Duo and updated my network switches to gigabit speeds with two D-Link Gigabit switches.

The expected Gigabit speeds 30 – 40 MB/s did not come. Instead I was getting sh*tty performance of 8 MB/s. So I tweaked a bunch of times then discovered the the bottleneck of the whole system was my NIC which when using the r8169 driver reports that 1000M mode is not advertised when probed by ethtool.

# ethtool eth0

This is because you are using the incorrect driver. Ubuntu linux by default somehow matches this particular NIC with the r8169 driver. You can fix this by downloading the correct r8168 driver, unpacking the downloaded driver archive and installing the driver following a quick step by step how-to in the r8168 driver’s readme file.

» Read more: How to Get Gigabit Speeds from RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller on Ubuntu Linux

I am using Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat as my desktop OS and enjoying all the wonderful stability and great hardware support that has been steadily built by the Ubuntu Development team and Linux in general up to this point.

So when I tried to burn a Data CD of pictures to give to give to one of my colleagues who was on his way out, I was irritated by Brassero’s buggyness. Brassero, the default burning program used in Ubuntu 10.10 (perhaps other distributions before) was good before. I don’t know why all of a sudden it would burn the entire CD and then report in the end that it could not complete it and that there are corrupt files on the CD.

“This is Bullsh*t!” I thought. I tried another CD. Again, same result. “This is double Bullsh*t!!” my thought stream continued. But then I thought I’d look into the cause of the bug. I skimmed the reports and honestly had no time to look into why or how I could fix it. One comment linked to a possible solution, but I wasn’t going to go through this, go through trial and error, then have to do it again after some tweaking; I just wanted to quickly burn a CD.

» Read more: Ubuntu CD Burning: Brassero is OUT; GnomeBaker is IN

Hi everyone, this is just a quick how-to on handling the Ubuntu Maverick/Gnome Login Keyring issue which occurs when you change your user password.

The issue: You’ve decided to change your password for whatever reason and suddenly you’re presented with the following message whenever you launch an application you have instructed to “remember” your password.

Enter password to unlock your login keyring
The password you use to log in to your computer no longer matches that of your login keyring.

This is how you fix it:
» Read more: Fixing Gnome keyring / Login Keyring: “Enter Password to Unlock” issue

There are times when I feel like procrastinating and when I do, sometimes I like play the popular turn-based RTS game Battle for Wesnoth. I like to play BfW with sound though. I like hearing Delfador‘s thunder clap when he lowers the boom on an orc Chieftain twice his size and I like hearing the well put-together background music as I plot to defend against a legion of undead sent by the queen to try and end my attempt at reclaiming the thrown which is rightfully mine.

Anyway, to fix this issue, I installed the debian SDL library with X11 graphics and Pulse audio compiled Ubuntu Karmic has available in the repository.
Pulse audio is the default sound system used in Ubuntu Karmic.

Here’s the step by step

» Read more: Ubuntu Karmic: No Sound on Battle for Wesnoth?