The NIC still takes 10-200 seconds to come up after boot. A third option is to upgrade kernels, there’s some possibility that the mainline Linux driver is better. Another suggestion is to enable Wake-on-LAN (via Windows), but I don’t really believe that will work.

I did a lot of research. One proposed fix is to get a different device driver, from Realtek, not the Linux kernel sources. It’s a four year old bug in Ubuntu! How to fix it? (Other than buying a new NIC Realtek NICs are not well loved.) The Linux drivers are broken. Apparently this is a common problem across many Linux variants and people report other problems, too, packet loss and dropped packets. The motherboard docs say it’s a Realtek 81111E. The problem is the Realtek 8111 or 8168, a very common motherboard ethernet adapter.

The ethernet interface is very slow to come up after boot, taking 10-120 seconds. Ubuntu doesn’t work out of the box with my ethernet adapter. Update Jan 2013: this driver issue was fixed in Ubuntu 12.04 / kernel 3.2.0-14 or so.

Realtek 8111c driver linux