Recently I was doing some troubleshooting on my home network. I connected a patch cable from my router to my Dell Latitude laptop running Fedora 39 and I couldn’t connect to my network or get to any external sites. That’s when I noticed the wired icon usually in the GNOME system tray on my desktop, was not present on my laptop. Then I went to look for wired network settings in GNOME-settings and found nothing there…
I’m running Fedora 39 on my laptop and desktop.
I’m not sure how to even start troubleshooting or fixing this, but I did run lspci to see if the controller was even listed there and it is: 00:19.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Ethernet Connection I218-LM (rev 04) full output below.
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Haswell-ULT DRAM Controller (rev 0b)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Haswell-ULT Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0b)
00:03.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Haswell-ULT HD Audio Controller (rev 0b)
00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 8 Series USB xHCI HC (rev 04)
00:19.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Ethernet Connection I218-LM (rev 04)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 8 Series HD Audio Controller (rev 04)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 8 Series PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev e4)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 8 Series PCI Express Root Port 4 (rev e4)
00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 8 Series PCI Express Root Port 5 (rev e4)
00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 8 Series USB EHCI #1 (rev 04)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 8 Series LPC Controller (rev 04)
00:1f.2 RAID bus controller: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile SATA Controller [RAID mode] (rev 04)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 8 Series SMBus Controller (rev 04)
02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wireless 7260 (rev 73)
03:00.0 SD Host controller: O2 Micro, Inc. SD/MMC Card Reader Controller (rev 01)
I happen to have another Latitude E7440 laptop laying around, so I started that one up and found that it has the same ethernet controller and wired network options are present in the settings app on that computer.
No idea why this particular install of Fedora is missing those settings. I’m hoping one of you fine people might be able to point me in the right direction toward fixing this. While yes, I am using wireless most of the time, I would still like to have the ethernet working as a backup or for troubleshooting the network was was recently the case.
Having two systems is helpful as you can can compare installed packages and journalctl results and even swap ethernet cables and network cards to see if the problem moves.
Do the two systems have similar histories (purchased new at the same time versus purchased on ebay)? Does either one have multiple OS’s installed?
Could the broken system have some 3rd party Gnome extensions that aren’t on the working system?
Compare inxi -Nxx to confirm that the hardware is the same. Dell often uses different network hardware under the same model name.
Compare the firmware status of the two systems by running sudo fwupdtool get-updates and `dnf list installed *firmware*. Get the name of the module used for ethernet in the working system and try manually loading the module in the other system to see if there are useful error messages.
You should also compare journalctl -b -g eth between the two systems. The broken system should mention some issue.
Thanks for your response Geroge. The two systems were purchased as refurbished units from the same dealer a few years apart. They are both running Fedora 39 Workstation. Neither system is using any GNOME extensions.
Lattitude #1
Newer machine where wired settings are missing from settings app.
dennis@fedora-laptop:~$ sudo fwupdtool get-updates
WARNING: UEFI firmware can not be updated in legacy BIOS mode
See https://github.com/fwupd/fwupd/wiki/PluginFlag:legacy-bios for more information.
Devices with no available firmware updates:
• WD Blue SA510 2.5 250GB
No updates available for remaining devices
When I checked the journal, the -g eth caught a lot of messages with “cannot invoke method” for gnome boxes and gnome terminal. But I couldn’t find anything relevant to ethernet.
Lattitude #2
Slightly older machine with wired settings present in settings app.
[dennis@fedora-latitude ~]$ sudo fwupdtool get-updates
WARNING: UEFI firmware can not be updated in legacy BIOS mode
See https://github.com/fwupd/fwupd/wiki/PluginFlag:legacy-bios for more information.
Devices with no available firmware updates:
• LMH-128V2M-11 MSATA 128GB
No updates available for remaining devices
The two laptops appear to have the same ethernet device. Just to be sure, I connected #2 to ethernet and sure enough, it works normally. The driver appears to be missing from Latitude #1. How do I get that driver installed? I’ve never done that before. My first time ever having a driver issue with any Linux distro.
Do those models support UEFI? There may be BIOS updates from Dell. You should be able to see BIOS versions to compare. Also check BIOS to see if ethernet is enabled and configured the same way.
You show only 1 journalctl output. Are they both the same? Is so, next comparison would be journalctl -b -g eno1 between the two systems.
Did wired networking ever work on the problem system or have you only used wifi?
See if you can check the original hardware configuration on the Dell site (there may not be much support for systems purchased in volume by large organizations as support is supposed to be handled by the organization’s IT group and specs often differ from direct to consumer models). It would not surprise me to find that the non-working system was sold with different wifi hardware. You can also check for current firmware versions and compare with what is actually in the systems.
I checked the dell website and it looks like I do have the most recent BIOS, version A28.
The output of smbios-token-ctl -i 0x032b does show the automatic control you’re talking about.
Token: 0x032b - WLAN Control Auto Sense (Enable)
value: token query failed: Low level SMI call failed.
kl&
Desc: When the wireless WLAN device is enabled, this token will enable the fe
ature that automatically turns off the wireless WLAN when the wired WLA
N is connected to the network
But when I go through the BIOS myself, I can’t find any such option with that exact same name. I did find an option called wireless switch which pertains to the physical on/off switch on the computer. I disabled that anyway. Then under power settings I found a setting called smart connect, which enables wifi to be turned on periodically while the machine is in sleep/suspend. Not exactly what I was looking for but I disabled it anyway. Still no luck however. My problem persists. Is it possible to change the setting with smbios-token-ctl? I tried a few variations of the command below and got a Python traceback error each time. I might be doing it wrong though, the man page wasn’t very clear.
dennis@fedora-laptop:~$ sudo smbios-token-ctl --set-string 0x032b disable
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/sbin/smbios-token-ctl", line 475, in <module>
sys.exit( main() )
^^^^^^
File "/usr/sbin/smbios-token-ctl", line 391, in main
tokenObj = getTokenObj(tokenTable, tokenXlator, options)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
File "/usr/sbin/smbios-token-ctl", line 353, in getTokenObj
raise CmdlineError(_("require token-id or token name/setting pair."))
CmdlineError: require token-id or token name/setting pair.
I also booted the laptop with a live Ubuntu ISO. The problem remains in that situation as well - no ethernet settings available. I think this confirms that the problem is a hardware/BIOS one.
