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My brother received a Dell Inspirion 530S for free from a neighbor and he had me install Linux on it. I went with stock Ubuntu since this is my first time and I figured it would be easiest to use with the most support.

The computer's ethernet controller is
Intel Corporation 82562V-2 10/100 Network Connection

Checking on Intel's website, support for the controller dropped at kernel 3.

Should I revert to 3 or is there some way for me to make it work on 4? What features would I lose by reverting? I don't know if I want my brother to lose access to future updates purely for Ethernet access.

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migrated from stackoverflow.com Dec 23 '15 at 18:30

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@shellter Okay thank you! – SpaghettiCodeSauce Dec 21 '15 at 23:43
    
It looks like a pretty old piece of hardware. You can try installing a kernel module specific for the driver. You also have the option of physically replacing the outdated piece of hardware for something newer, if your computer allows for it. – Poriferous Dec 21 '15 at 23:52
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Support may be dropped, but Linux runs on computers created in the 1990's. linux v4.x.y will probably work fine. Just install and see. They don't erase the driver source. The reason Intel "dropped" support is that the H/W is old. But, it's stable and the linux driver probably is too. It's part of the "e100" driver which is still there in 4.2.6 [I just looked in the driver source]. Fire when ready, Gridley ... – Craig Estey Dec 21 '15 at 23:57
    
@CraigEstey hey thanks for giving me such a complete answer even though my question was in the wrong place. I flagged my question to see if the moderator could move it just like shellter said, but I didn't get anything back. I was worried this might happen, but I couldn't figure out where to go instead until shellter let me know. Not new to programming, but very new to Linux. – SpaghettiCodeSauce Dec 22 '15 at 5:12
    
I've advocated for other OPs that got closed [for same reason] to be migrated. It takes ~2 days. I'm a longtime linux kernel/driver programmer. Just try it--it will work. Even if Intel doesn't support the H/W, the driver has been handed off to core kernel people called "maintainers". Your driver is in the mainline kernel source tree, they will keep it going [normally, just tweaks for OS version compatibility, but fixes for bad bugs, too]. Note: All the 8 listed maintainers for your driver, as of this msg, have @intel.com email addresses. – Craig Estey Dec 22 '15 at 5:57

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