AussieJohn Posted September 8, 2011 Report Share Posted September 8, 2011 (edited) Hello everyone, I am here in Maine, USA. at the moment and working on a computer loaned to me by my host friends. I'll be here for 8 weeks. I have installed Mageia-1 on it and am using a wifi adapter to connect to their cable modem. Setup works AOK. I cannot find a way to disable the onboard LAN. I have removed the LAN cable but it keeps showing up in the Internet connections and seems to prevent the machine from setting up the wifi connection. Thus it has to be done manually each time the computer is rebooted. On my machine at home I found this to be necessary and would like to set this up the same way. Cheers. John. [moved from Hardware by spinynorman] Edited September 9, 2011 by AussieJohn Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
daniewicz Posted September 8, 2011 Report Share Posted September 8, 2011 There is probably a setting in the BIOS to disable the onboard LAN. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AussieJohn Posted September 8, 2011 Author Report Share Posted September 8, 2011 Thanks Daniel, for your post. I had already hunted through the Bios but could not find any reference to the LAN anywhere. Hence my plea here. This is not to say that it isn't there because I may just be missing it somehow. The Bios is a weird basic layout of the kind that I remember used to be in computers 10 years ago, very much retro and not very helpful. I hope someone with Dell machine experience might give me a clue here. I hope. :-) Cheers. John. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted September 8, 2011 Report Share Posted September 8, 2011 I'm not sure how the connection is being managed, but check /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0. In this file there will be an onboot option or similar which can be set from yes to no and then it shouldn't become active. That should at least let you get around it if the option in the BIOS doesn't exist as not all computers have it. Alternatively, configuring the eth0 connection in MCC should give you the option of disabling it without it enabling onboot. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AussieJohn Posted September 9, 2011 Author Report Share Posted September 9, 2011 Thank you Ian That did the trick. I used to do the usual routine of using MCC to disable but it would never hold through a reboot. It does now. There is no LAN message that ethernet is down. There is just a short pause and then the wi-fi connection comes up as one would expect.. Cheers. John. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AussieJohn Posted September 9, 2011 Author Report Share Posted September 9, 2011 I spoke too soon. After I made the suggested change to the file, I rebooted and it worked but later on I rebooted again and the problem was back. I checked the file and it was still as I had changed it. I also went into MCC to remove LAN connection again since it has appeared in here once more, Rebooted and still have same old problem. :wall: John. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted September 9, 2011 Report Share Posted September 9, 2011 We can also blacklist the kernel module for the ethernet card that way the device will never appear. Usually under /etc/modprobe.d and create a new file but of course we just need to find out what module is being loaded for that particular card. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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