I am having trouble connecting to a wired network. This happened after some unintentional configuration changes. It's possible I may have accidentally uninstalled my networking driver. This computer has been working fine for roughly 2 years before these changes.
My ethernet hardware info (lspci | grep Ethernet):
06:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 06)
I read online that this hardware frequently has issues. I read to install r8168-dkms driver, which might help solve my problem link. However, when I attempt to build the driver I get:
$ sudo dkms build r8168/8.037.00 -k $(uname -r)/$(uname -p)"
...
ERROR (dkms apport): kernel package linux-headers-4.4.0-138-generic is not supported
Error! Bad return status for module build on kernel: 4.4.0-138-generic (x86_64)
At this point I'm not really sure what to try next. I don't have an internet connection, so I can't use apt-get install to install the drivers I need. Although, I am considering going and buying a cheap USB ethernet connection to help me.
How I got in this situation
The problem began after I installed snap: sudo apt-get install snapd
After installation the system was still working, but next time I restarted my the computer the screen was low-res and going through a login loop. Looking at some error logs, I found this to be an issue with nvidia drivers.
I uninstalled snap, and the nvidia drivers. I was able to login, but found I was now unable to connect to my wired network. It's possible I accidentally uninstalled more than just the nvidia drivers (ie. accidentally uninstalled a chipset driver). Another possibility is that the installation of snap affected the networking drivers similar to how it affected the nvidia drivers.
EDIT 1
I downloaded the .deb for r8168/8.041.00 and successfully built it. I got the .deb from here.
When I tried to run sudo dkms build ... for the driver, I get:
Module r8168/8.04.00 already built for kernel 4.4.0-138-generic/4
However, my networking problems are not fixed. I no longer see eth0 in ifconfig. I might try one of the newer .deb and see if that fixes.
EDIT 2
I got a USB ethernet card which allowed me to connect to the internet. I turned my focus to installing the nvidia drivers. That is what's now giving me problems. No matter what driver I install, I get the login loop. At this point I'm considering buying a new GPU and/or upgrading to 16.06...
