I recently purchased a Gigabyte GA-Z68AP-D3 motherboard as part of a new PC build. When I went to install Ubuntu on it, my network connection was horribly slow--time outs all over the place, slow downloads, and even slow transfer speeds on the local network. A bit of research showed a mind boggling amount of dropped packets as well. As it turns out, this motherboard (and presumably other motherboards of the GA-Z68 series) have a Realtek 8111E ethernet chipset, which has some known issues in Ubuntu--namely that Ubuntu loads a slightly wrong driver for it. The driver works, sort of, but people see lots of issues like mine--dropped packets, slow speeds, etc.
Thankfully the fix is fairly easy. Realtek has the proper Linux driver available. Even though it says it is for kernels 2.4.x and 2.6.x, I can confirm that it does indeed work in the 3.0.x kernels present in Ubuntu 11.10.
There are some great instructions over at Foxhop.net. Note that the first step will be making sure that you have your kernel headers and build-essential packages installed! After installing the proper driver, everything is working just like it should.
In short, they are:
- Get the updated driver:
wget http://www.foxhop.net/attachment/r8168-8.023.00.tar.bz2
- Remove the offending kernel module:
sudo rmmod r8169
- Install the new driver:
cd r8168-8.023.00 sudo ./autorun.sh