Acer Aspire V3-571G Dual Boot Win 7 and Kubuntu: Difficult Linux Network Config

My Aunty has an Acer Aspire V3-571G-6602 laptop that originally had Windows 7 Home on it. Then Microsoft decided she should upgrade to Windows 10, all without asking her. Her machine was slow on the reboot and looked locked up. The auto upgrade to Windows 10 and the subsequent auto upgrades persuaded her that this was not kosher, but simply wrong. I lent her an older Lubuntu system, 12 years old, while I deciphered her predicament, and she started to really like the simplicity and speed of Ubuntu. Really, she only uses a browser.

Her Windows 7 Home machine is pretty good. Her problems began when Microsoft auto-initiated a Windows 10 upgrade. From Acer, her machine was not certified for Windows 10, and others have had great difficulties with the upgrade. I plugged he laptop into a wired network, and after a couple of hours of ignoring it, the upgrade somehow completed. Performance was sporadic as it continued to upgrade. Finally, when Win 10 stabilized, it worked Ok. The auto-upgrade of useless upgrades continued and this bothered me.

The Overall Plan
The plan was to back up Windows 10, then use the Acer recovery partition to recover the original Windows 7 Home, followed by a dual boot setup, a repartition and installation of an ubuntu-family OS. The ubuntu system would be her main computer, with Win 7 as backup, dual boot.

Backing Up Windows 10
With Windows 10 stabilized, I made a Win 10 repair disk, as well as a Win 10 recovery disk. You need a 16G US for the recovery disk. This went ok.

Testing Linux on USB
With Windows 10 stabilized, I booted up with a Puppy Linux Tahr 6.0.5 disk, which is Ubuntu 14.04. This worked really well, connecting to the wired network with ease. We could see that the recovery partition looked intact. We were able to back up her data on a USB, just in case.

I downloaded and installed Kubuntu 16.04, and like Puppy, it installed easily, had a wired ethernet connection and worked well.

Restoring Windows 7 Home
The enclosed Acer software included an option to restore the original OS on the recovery partition, which was Windows 7 Home. This would wipe out the whole disk, and Windows 10 included. This restore took a long time, but was successful. I needed to do a system cleanup many times, followed by a defrag, but it worked well.

Installing Kubuntu 16.04
Now for the tricky part. I installed the very same USB stick with Kubuntu 16.04 to ram and it would not see the wired connection to my lan. Very odd. Anyway, I thought when I’d finish the Kubuntu install it would resolve itself. I repartitioned and formatted the Win 7 disk and installed Kubuntu without error, though it did say that there was no connection. In the end the ethernet hard wired connection never worked.

I did lots of research, tried lots of command, all to no avail. The wired connection did not work. No Ip address, no dhcp.

I tried loading onto the USB:

• Kubuntu 17.04
• Ubuntu 16.04
• Ubuntu 14.04
• Arch Bang

and none of them recognize the ethernet cable

I

t seems like the restore reverted the laptop’s BIOS back to 1.07, so I upgraded to Acer’s recommended BIOS 1.13, dated 2012/10/22. No change.

Ethernet card: Netlink BCM57785 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe, driver: tg3, V15.0.1.0
Wireless card: roadcom BCM43228, driver: bcma-pci-bridge

Linux commands I used:

• ifconfig: should show me an IP address
• lshw -c network: shows me the logical name, enp2s0f0
• lspci vnn -d 14e4: Broadcom drivers
• ethtool enp2s0f0
  sudo ethtool enp2s0f0 speed 100 duplex full autoneg off: try to set the card manually
• sudo dhclient enp3s0f0: ask for a dhcp IP address

Solution: Connect Kubuntu 16.04 using Wifi
I had no internet connection whatsoever, so this was an issue. I stumbled on this thread No ethernet or wifi on fresh Lubuntu 16.04 install, Acer Aspire 5560, where the expert, Wildmanne39, proposed a solution. Copy some debs from the install USB to the desktop and install them. It worked.

You have the wrong driver installed for your wireless please do the following:

Your Broadcom 14e4:4358 uses bcmwl-kernel-source. It and its dependency dkms are on the installation DVD or USB. Insert the install media and navigate to pool > restricted > b > bcmwl and drag and drop the bcmwl deb package to your desktop. Do the same with pool > main > d > dkms. Now we install the deb files. Open a terminal and:

cd ~/Desktop
sudo dpkg -i *.deb
sudo modprobe wl

Your wireless should know work, it would be a lot easier with an internet connection but if you can not get online this will have to do.

Once the modprobe command was executed a bunch of wifi networks started popping up. I authenticated to mine and i was connected. Using wifi, which is somewhat slower I was able to update the system, and install all the necessary software she needed. I still cannot connect using ethernet, a problem that I should try to fix, but Aunty wants her computer back.

At Aunty’s House: Ethernet and Wifi now work
I plug in an ethernet cable directly into her router and to her laptop and Kubuntu recognizes it and connects. Really, you could not do this at my house? I stop and restart her wireless, then unplug the ethernet card, click the wireless checkbox (this is a little too subtle), and her network comes up. I authenticate without issue.

I really do not know why, but in the end it did come together and work, just not under my complete control of timing. Such is Linux. I almost gave up on ubuntu and linux, but am glad I stuck by them.

Learnings:
There’s more than one way to get to the goal. In this case, though the road to ethernet connectivity was blocked, wifi provided a path, Kubuntu updated and somehow repaired ethernet itself. t does not matter how you get to the server, provided you make the connection, slower or faster.