I have a Dell Latitude 5420 laptop with LMDE, running kernel 6.1.0-12. This laptop has a builtin I219-LM ethernet controller that I can see via lspci. Some research indicates that this needs the e1000e kernel module, so I grabbed it from Intel, compiled it, and installed it. There were some complaints during the compilation, but nothing more than the average compilation process. Plus, it shows up in lsmod. Afterwards, lspci -vv displays it with the e1000e driver:
0000:00:1f.6 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Ethernet Connection (13) I219-LM (rev 20)
Subsystem: Dell Ethernet Connection (13) I219-LM
Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster- SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx-
Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx-
Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 16
IOMMU group: 15
Region 0: Memory at a6100000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=128K]
Capabilities: [c8] Power Management version 3
Flags: PMEClk- DSI+ D1- D2- AuxCurrent=0mA PME(D0+,D1-,D2-,D3hot+,D3cold+)
Status: D0 NoSoftRst+ PME-Enable- DSel=0 DScale=1 PME-
Capabilities: [d0] MSI: Enable- Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
Address: 0000000000000000 Data: 0000
Kernel modules: e1000e
However, when I do lshw, it is listed as unclaimed:
*-network:1 UNCLAIMED
description: Ethernet controller
product: Ethernet Connection (13) I219-LM
vendor: Intel Corporation
physical id: 1f.6
bus info: pci@0000:00:1f.6
version: 20
width: 32 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi cap_list
configuration: latency=0
resources: memory:a6100000-a611ffff
...and of course, it's still not showing in ifconfig. So, where do I go from here? Did I miss anything obvious?
And just for the record, I know that the ethernet port is working. It worked fine in Win11 before wiped the PC completely.
If I had to guess, I'd say that e1000 cards are pretty well supported on every public distribution/kernel they offer without any extra modules, but I don't have any around to verify it. At least on this ubuntu I don't find any e1000 related firmware package or anything else, so I'd guess it's supported out of the box.
For the ifconfig, if you omit '-a' it doesn't show interfaces that are down, so maybe that's the obvious you're missing? It should show up on NetworkManager (or any other graphical tool, as well as nmcli and other cli alternatives), but as you're going trough the manual route I assume you're not running any. Mii-tool should pick it up too on command line.
And if it's not that simple, there seems to be at least something around the internet if you search for 'NVM cheksum is not valid' and 'e1000e', spesifically related to dell, but I didn't check that path too deep.