Intel Sandy Bridge NIC Driver for Linux (e1000e)

The short version of this story is “don’t have any spaces in your directory path.”

My recent multi-boot build was based on an Intel DH67CL motherboard with an H67 chipset.  The NIC is an Intel 82579V, PCI ID 8086,1503.  I downloaded the Intel driver direct from the Intel site: Network Adapter Driver for PCI-E Gigabit Network Connections under Linux.

It built, installed, and worked on several Linuxen in this multi-boot machine – including a live CD image (with persistenct) that I keep in the boot partition – but failed for Suse Enterprise Linux V11.

The error message during build was something like “no rule to make target xxxx.”

Turns out it was nothing to do with Suse.  Since I didn’t have a working NIC, I was downloading to a windows machine, copying to a thumb drive, and copying that to the target Linux install. The download directory on the Windows box was something like “Intel NIC Driver”.  By chance, I had copied its contents to most of my Linux installs, but copied the entire directory to the Suse install.

The spaces in the directory name were confusing make, and causing the less-than-helpful error message.  Got rid of the spaces, and make was happy again.

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One Response to Intel Sandy Bridge NIC Driver for Linux (e1000e)

  1. Jonathan says:

    Thank you for this. I just copied the src directory to my machine and tried to build it. It couldn’t find e1000e.7. Turns out it was one directory up, in the parent.

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