Ive finally sorted it out. The reason that it has taken so long to sort out is the appalling documentation of the boot process. Eventually, I had to resort to go through initrd.img with a fine tooth-comb to find buried in the initrd init script that there was, in fact, a boot time blacklist option. This was not mentioned anywhere in any of the Debian or Unbuntu documentation or anywhere on the internet. The solution, which has taken three weeks to find, is to edit the boot parameters in /boot/grub/menu.lst: add "blacklist=r8169".
I would hope that users with less experience than myself would get more support/encouragement. It is now more than two weeks since I posted the first call for help. In that time, it would appear that the only action taken is the award of a bug number (779040). No other acknowledgement triage or other action seems to have been taken. I think that you can now classify this as a bug, possibly a kernel bug, that has been solved. The bug would appear to be the kernel probing is insufficient to distinguish between early versions of the Realteak RTL8101/RTL8102 chipset and the latest RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express chipset (for which the r8169 seems to be only partially compatible). The problem was not helped by the lack of Ubuntu documentation of how to turn off the dreaded DHCP. I believe that the (expert) user should be given the option of setting up a static IP address in the install dialog. On security grounds, all users should be given the option of disabling wlan -- which does wonders for laptop battery life! John Hunter -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/779040 Title: System hangs (solid) early during shutdown -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
