e1000e-dkms-debian VS 88x2bu

Hello, Our hardware vendor stopped selling the previous models of our standard desktops and laptops and possess sent the newest models in our latest purchase. Unfortunately, when installing Ubuntu on these machines the NICs are not recognized by the OS and need manual intervention to be updated, which I was able to get going by downloading the appropriate e1000e driver onto a USB and installing from that. Our standard workflow was provisioning the system with Foreman, and configuring it with ansible after the OS was installed. The manual steps now required between these steps have caused delays in setting up new equipment. Getting this hardware to allow PXE in the first place was a pain, I had to take the initrd.gz that foreman provides for the PXE environment, unpack it and replace the e1000e network driver with the very latest one to even allow the PXE process to start. But because the archive foreman uses for Ubuntu is the standard Canonical hosted Ubuntu archive, the OS is again missing that version of the driver and it needs to get updated again. Does anyone have recommendations on how to get around this? * I tried using HWE but it seems to not include this very latest version of e1000e so had no luck there * Could this process be included in the preseed file/provisioning template to handle the driver? * Our foreman install has Katello, but I have been having a hell of a time getting deb repos hosted. Even if that gets set up properly, it seems pretty‍ hacky again to insert a kernel with the correct driver version. (GPG issues? idk) * Foreman/Katello docs are lackluster and havent seen anything related to this kind of problem * FYI the desktop is a Dell Precision Tower 3650 and installing Ubuntu 18.04 I was hired as a Junior Sys Admin 2 years and now find myself as the sole IT in the company, this has been driving me nuts as my previous provisioning workflow was pretty solid but dont have anyone internal to turn to for advice. Would really appreciate any thoughts or ideas you all have or any resources you know of I can look into. Thanks! EDIT: Thanks for the replies everyone, I ended up getting this resolved by using DKMS. https://github.com/koljah-de/e1000e-dkms-debian was a good starting point, I built a deb from that and placed it on my tftp server. Then in Foreman's finish template I included the following lines: tftp -m binary tftp.example.com -c get e1000e-dkms.deb dpkg -i e1000e-dkms.deb That worked for me, after the installation process the NIC was usable. Plus this has the added benefit of not needing to tweak the drivers after upgrading the kernel at a later date.

Intel out-of-tree NIC drivers too; https://sourceforge.net/projects/e1000/ - But there are not many!

[1] qemu/hw/net/e1000.c [2] Devices supported by Linux's e1000 [3] e1000 from Intel

I use an Archer T3U to use wifi off of my desktop machine. It doesn't have a linux native driver, but this one works for me so far.

I use this driver instead, but I think it all comes down to what does your wifi card need. You can download the driver in another computer and then pass it with a usb stick or, connect through your mobile phone via tethering and then download the driver directly in your computer

I installed DKMS and this 88x2 github driver recommended by this post.

Device connects and functions properly in normal operation with the following driver: https://github.com/morrownr/88x2bu.git

My original rEFInd configuration got overwritten by the non-graphical GRUB from HoloISO. However, I was still able to boot into all OSes. I went ahead and booted into SteamOS to test. My WIFI dongle was dead, so I used my phone in USB tether mode to have internet access. I downloaded the drivers for my WIFI dongle from my usual source off Github (https://github.com/morrownr/88x2bu). I booted back into Ubuntu and re-installed rEFInd so I can have the GUI OS selector.

Seems like you have to use a third-party driver from github. Probably this one. Carefully read the instructions. Also you should install additional firmware for your card. Good luck.

I use the TP Link Archer T3U which has an RTL8812BU WiFi chip. The driver can be found at https://github.com/morrownr/88x2bu but needs to be compiled (instructions are at the web page itself).

He'll have to compile the kernel module from scratch. Here's a git repository for the Realtek RTL8812BU and RTL8822BU driver: https://github.com/morrownr/88x2bu