Realtek has a new gigabit chipset which is appearing on various motherboards, including the Asus M2A-VM board. At the time of writing (with kernel 2.6.22 being the default), this driver is not yet included in the default kernel tree.

Thanks to Realtek's wonderful support for linux, they have the driver source for various Unix/Linux flavours available for download on their website.

Downloading the driver

Download the driver from the official download site.

Compiling and installing the driver

First, have your dependencies in order by having the following:

• A sane build environment (contains gcc, make, etc.)
• The kernel tree and/or headers of your current kernel.
• Root access for installing and using the driver (of course).

Once all that is in order, extract the source:

# tar xjf r8168-8.003.00.tar.bz2
# cd r8168-8.003.00

If you are running the target kernel, you should be able to run:

# make clean && make modules
# make install

To finish the install, do:

# depmod -ae

Using the driver

Load the driver (from anywhere) with:

# modprobe r8168

To check whether the module loads:

# lsmod | grep r8168
r8168                  32592  0

You should also be able to see the interface with:

# ifconfig -a

Configure the network interface like you would normally.