@toad,
will be glad to try that, but please give me a few days, because AT&T is sending a replacement router.
I am not really hopeful that this will solve problem because it would be same model, and their online tests show that present router is working OK.
I have cleared device list in present router, reset it to defaults, rebooted the whole network, and still get the pesky error of this laptop unable to connect over wire.
Looks like the router is banning the MAC address of the card, but I cannot clear that setting.
Anyway, will shortly test your static IP solution and be back here.

as it's a portable have you tried taking it to a friend's and testing there to eliminate the router as the cause?

is there another os on or a livecd to test to eliminate the current config & distro

@google01103
First question, answer is no, I don't think that will happen soon, not many friends.
I could try the live CD, will go to distrowatch shortly and see what I can find there.
Please bear with me, I am very busy, and laptop is limping along on wireless.
I do appreciate enormously your help.

Sorry for delay in answering.
I asked for a replacement router and AT&T sent me the wrong router twice.
FInally they sent a tech who replaced the whole wiring and router.
Issues with laptop plugged to wired network persisted.
I booted up with Knoppix 7.2 and it worked fine, but I am not sure that it was connected over wired since both connections were active.
Problem is that wired connection works but it is not reliable because it will die, and I have to go wireless.
This shouldn't happen since I have WICD set to switch to wired network when available, I should not have to disable wireless but I will, to do some more testing.
Plasma widget network manager did not help much either.
I am getting more convinced that it is in fact a hardware issue, it is an old refurbished laptop.
Editing my network interfaces did not help either, in fact it made matters worse, so I reverted to previous version, which is the same one on the working computer.
Anyway, will disable wireless and try again, and I will also try the static IP trick.
After that, I will give up, It wouldn't matter much to have it on wireless only, as I am building a wired desktop computer, and moving laptop to a place where there is no cable.
Thanks a lot for all the answers, and hope to be back shortly with final results of tests.

No problem. It certainly does sound like a hardware problem considering the behaviour you are seeing - my guess would be certain pins in the connector are no longer capable of transmitting (only way to tell for sure would be to test each strand in the cable while it was connected at both ends with a multimeter).

If you think it is hardware do an lspci, look at your Ethernet controller and have a google to see whether there are others with the same issue as yours.

Otherwise I'd check everything network related in your set-up. Could it be that the lease cycle is too short? Whatever, here a link for Debian, which appears to be your distro:

https://wiki.debian.org/NetworkConfiguration

After lspci as root and googling results for my card Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10), I found out that I am not alone in having problems with this damn card, I found a solution that is working for the moment:

Code: Select all

root@ubuntu:~$ mii-tool eth0 -F 10baseT-FD
root@ubuntu:~$ rmmod 8139too
root@ubuntu:~$ modprobe 8139too

I am not using Ubuntu, I just ran those commands as root.
Will post here after a few days of testing to see if solution holds or if card becomes inconsistent again.

Finally this laptop crashed.
I bought it refurbished in 2005 and although I replaced disks (two) and upgraded memory, the system hard drive died.
I put another one in there and attempted to load system via installer, but it always crashed because computer was losing ethernet connection.
Sometimes it even forced sudden complete shutdown, symptom which disappeared upon disconnection.
This is evidence that there was a hardware issue in that connection, unrelated to system and KDE.
So I would like to close this thread, since I have more important things to query the KDE community about.
Thanks for all the help.

try to connect the wire to an external docking station. may the problem in the laptop port.
Here to see the accessories http://www.touch4laptop.com/laptop-acce ... -business/