I’ve finally gotten the expansion card in.
Is there an official driver I should use? Does/will Framework include this driver in their single .exe driver pack?
Windows defaulted to this driver in screenshot; dated from 2016! Does this this right or should I download from Realtek’s driver page?
Would it be possible for someone to explain how to install the Realtek driver?
I’m running Fedora 36 on 5.19. My Ethernet expansion card works. I tried it on another USBC laptop and it works immediately. I’ve also used it successfully with zero-config on my Framework 12th gen running Windsor 11, Fedora 37 Beta and Fedora 36 live-cd. For some reason, my installation of Fedora 36 won’t work with the Ethernet expansion card. I’m considering reinstalling 36 or installing beta 37 to try and get it to work. Other ethernet adapters work just fine with my current install, but for some reason it just won’t work on my install.
So, to get it working for debian 11, i had to download the firmare-realtek package from debian/sid, install that manually add the udev file from Realtek’s driver to /etc/udev/rules.d/50-usb-realtek-net.rules and now i have a happily working nic, whereas before it was sadness and repeat blinks. (also, used the wrong driver, cdc_ncm instead of realtek’s)
JFYI, the ethernet expansion card works out-of-the-box with recent Haiku nightlies (at least for a couple of minutes) - fortunately, because for the installation to the internal SSD from an anyboot image which needed an update, the Intel AX210 was recognized but couldn’t find a single SSID out of 20+ near me (for some reason, it does after installation).
It’s provided as a .tar.bz2 compressed archive with source code inside.
Decompress it, get into the directory and:
./configure
make
make install
That’s for Linux Mint/Ubuntu/Debian, I think it should work for Fedora as well.
Also the ReadMe says:
For Fedora, you may have to run the following command after installing the
driver.
# dracut -f
For what it’s worth, I’ve done extensive power tests with powerstat. It does many samples (e.g. every 10 seconds over 5 minutes) after a settle down period, so you can really do good comparisons. My test procedure is basically:
xset 600 3 && sudo true && xbacklight -set 0 && sudo powerstat ; xbacklight -set 100
… that is:
sudo password before disabling the backlightYou can run this test in your normal GUI, but I also recommend turning off everything you can to remove noise. Ideally, you’d run those tests in single-user mode (systemctl rescue + pkill -u 1000 or shutdown now if you’re not using systemd), but that makes it harder to control backlight.
At the very least make sure to remove all other modules first. Run a test without the module (to get a baseline) and with the module.
HTH!
The driver date is just the original date of the first version of the driver. The driver version windows installs is from this year indicated by the .2022. That is the best driver to use. I updated to the latest driver from Realteck and it killed the NIC performance by 93%
Yet another application for the ethernet expansion card: installing OpenBSD. Release 7.1 (at the moment still the latest one) doesn’t work with the Intel AX210 wifi card, only the recent snapshots do - as well as probably release 7.2 (coming this month?). However, it is still useful since you don’t have to download the iwx firmware for the AX210 in advance.
The driver page captured in the youtube video (timestamped below) doesn’t show the RTL8156:
The 8156 driver page should be this:
https://www.realtek.com/en/component/zoo/category/network-interface-controllers-10-100-1000m-gigabit-ethernet-usb-3-0-software
Should be 10.54.20 (screenshot), and not 10.60 (from the video)
I installed the correct version, I think I just grabbed the wrong screencap for the B-Roll. The 10.54.20 version knocked the speed test results from 1400 Mbps to something like 98 Mbps on Win 10.
Yeah, I thought that was a possibility…
Did you try any other previous version(s) between what’s included in Windows 10 and something lower than 10.54.20?
For example, there’s 10.50.20 from Targus:
Drivers & Downloads | DOCK423 | Targus USA
No I just rolled ot back to the Windows installed version as it worked at basically full speed. I’ll take a closer look at the Linux drivers when I get a chance.
Got my Ethernet expansion card when it first dropped. Been trying to get it to work ever since which includes:
I can’t seem to get more than a little blip from the lights. It works when I boot with the card plugged in, but just plugging it in, I get nothing.
I’ve been using a no-name-Amazon Ethernet to USB-C dongle for almost a year without trouble. All my other expansion cards work in every slot (USB-A, USB-C, DisplayPort, HDMI, Micro SD).
Is the card wrong, or am I? Should something that’s advertised as being a simple plug-and-play solution be this difficult? Any help would be much appreciated.
@mackncheesiest did you ever resolve this? My adapter worked for a long while, but when I tried it tonight, it’s exactly like you reported. Front ports, status lights would flicker, but the laptop wouldn’t see it. Rear ports it would see it, but never detected a cable was inserted.
I was able to resolve all of this; reinstalled the driver using the commands listed above. Restarted the laptop. Now it works in either port. I assume the driver was removed during a kernel update.
Yeah, in my case, it ended up being a combination of a board swap through support (which made the device enumerate fine in the front ports) and disabling NetworkManager’s MAC Address Randomization for that interface. It was seemingly causing DHCP negotiation to fail.
I had, at some point, set Network Manager to use ethernet.cloned-mac-address=random. Even using ethernet.cloned-mac-address=stable didn’t work as, even though the address is stable, it is distinct from the hardware MAC. Once I set it to preserve and cleared out all nmcli connection entries for the card + an entry for it that had populated into /var/lib/NetworkManager/no-auto-default.state, it worked fine across all my ports.
Unless I’m mistaken, it honestly sounds to me like you’re better off just buying a USB Ethernet adapter. That big protrusion is a likely point of failure, and especially if it’s pulling 2.7W idle, I’d like to be able to detach it. The expansion cards aren’t that easy to swap, unfortunately.
Hi everyone,
I have a small issue where I purchased a Framework in the 1st gen era (feels like a lifetime ago) but now they don’t accept my card or billing address and I wanted one of these ethernet expansion cards.
Would any of you be so kind as to $ell me one?
They’re notoriously stiff.
When I travel, I’m at a different hotel basically every day and working on the train in between on batteries. So I’d end up having to insert and remove it quite frequently.
It’s the same as in the videos in that link. They don’t slide out easily. It takes a lot of force to get them out initially.
